The Gullspång Miracle, the debut documentary of Swedish filmmaker Maria Fredriksson, quickly became the talk of the festival when it opened Nordic film showcase Nordisk Panorama in Malmo last month, as audiences tried to get their heads around its startling twists and speculatively solve the untied ends of this eerie and outlandish story. We spoke to the director, who is one of the founders behind all-female production company Ballad Film, about the wild ride of making this peculiar documentary, ahead of its German premiere at DOK Leipzig in Germany this week, as it continues to gather buzz on its festival journey.
The film starts with the chance encounter, in the Swedish town of Gullspang, of two sixty-something sisters from the north of Norway with a woman who looks identical to their sibling who died by suicide in 1988. DNA tests reveal a long-lost twin. The miraculous discovery and family reunion was meant to be the core of the documentary. What followed, as the past came under new scrutiny and the possibility of a murder and cover-up swam into the frame, neither Fredriksson nor the sisters anticipated.
“At the beginning, I thought that it was a completely different film I was going to make,” said Fredriksson. The project had found her, not vice versa, after the sisters contacted a television broadcaster she has worked for. “I believed that everything exciting in this story had already happened, and that I needed to find a way to reconstruct and retell, much more than follow events in present time. But little did I know! The film changed shape and direction many times during the process.”
The eventful revelations and dramatic tensions within this eccentric family seem a gift for any documentarian — but as a debut feature project, it required Fredriksson jumping in at the deep end to navigate thorny emotions, existential questions of identity, and taboo zones of experience, not to mention wrangling a tangle of conflicting information into a coherent whole.
She said trust came easily with the sisters, and they “became close early on,” before difficulties arose. “They approached me with a lighthearted family reunion miracle story, and then it turned into something completely different, much darker. That was not what they wished for. But I’m happy to say that they love the finished film and are very proud of it. They all think it’s a very truthful and honest portrait of their story, which of course is crucial for me.”
Keeping her own presence transparently in the frame (“dramatisations can reduce the authenticity,” she believes), Fredriksson teases the audience with a buoyant theatricality and eerie elements of suspense, while never compromising the real human emotion of grief and the yearning to belong. “It’s important for me to always give space for playfulness in my films, regardless of theme or topic,” she said, crediting close collaboration with editor Mark Bukdahl, and composer Jonas Colstrup whose “expressive score” helped shape the tone.
As the investigation took on a life almost of its own, was it hard to know when to stop digging? “Almost impossible, actually,” answered Fredriksson. “I had been feeling it was my responsibility to find every answer to every new question that was raised. Then I realised that if the family wasn’t up for it any more, it’s their life and their choice. But lately they’ve said that they do want more answers, so we’ll see.” It’s the most Fredriksson will give away, when probed about the rumours of a pending sequel or series about the family that might be in the works. After all, if anyone knows how to keep a little mystery alive, it is her.
