Set up a year ago, the Swedish Film Institute (SFI)’s Wild Card initiative headed by Moving Sweden Film Commissioner Helen Ahlsson, offers single development grants of SEK 400,000 to freshly graduated film students as a fast track to making their first feature film or hybrid film. 

This year’s three recipients announced last week during the Stockholm Film Festival’s Industry Days were the following.  

  • Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts’s graduate Amanda Björk for her fiction project Hysterika. 
    The main character Ingrid who suffers from mental illness, is institutionalised and put in a mental ward where she confronts herself, her prejudices against the mental ward, and the other patients. She eventually finds her true self.

    Selected at Nordic Talents 2019 together with her producer Kajsa Haidl, Björk made a mark on the jury with her graduation film To Discharge and Hysterika pitch. She was selected by nordicfilmandtvnews.com as one of eight new Nordic voices to watch out. See article - CLICK HERE. 

  • Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts documentary graduate Jonathan Nikolaj Heinius for the gangster comedy Sophisticated Falliing.

    Darcia loses her job and apartment in Malmö. To get by, she shoplifts meat and gets involved in a shady meat racket in Denmark. She is framed for a missing delivery and must clear her name. To create a light and stylised film, the director said he will use his documentary background, the "Danish/Swedish sense of humour, from Ernst Hugo Järegård in Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom to Claes Bang in The Square” and "combine it with the aesthetics of the French and Czechoslovak New Wave.” 
  • New York-Columbia University graduate in screenwriting/directing Nathalie Álvarez Masén for her drama project The Wolf Will Tear Your Immaculate Hands. 
    The magical-realistic drama set in the 17th century focuses on Isabel who returns to her hometown to find out why her sister was murdered during the witch trials. The director who won several awards for her short films Filip and Shelter,  said she will tackle important topics such as power, freedom, belonging and openness through this genre film. 

Last year’s Wild Card recipients Fanny Ovesen, Jerry Carlsson and Ernst De Geer, are all working on their feature debuts.