“Authenticity is More Important than Anything Else”: Maria Fredriksson on Tribeca 2023 Premiere The Gullspång Miracle

Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction — it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), a woman who looks identical to the older sister (who also used to go by Lita) that committed suicide three decades before. And that’s when things get really bizarre. So they do what any diligent Scandinavians would do, I suppose — reach out to a documentary filmmaker. Which was likewise my compulsion, especially after realizing that this head-spinning yarn of a tale would not have unfolded (unraveled? gone off the rails?) at all had it not been for the presence of Fredriksson’s camera — a fact she makes unflinchingly transparent. So to learn all about collaborating with characters whose “desire to define their own truths becomes more important than knowing what is really true” (as Fredriksson claims in the press notes), Filmmaker caught up with the talented Swede just prior to the film’s Tribeca premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.