10/08/2026 - Swedish-Danish director and screenwriter Maria Bäck injects a healthy dose of edgy humour into a film exploring the absurd rules restricting many heterosexual couples

Swedish-Danish director Maria Bäck is presenting the world premiere of her second fiction feature, Brave New Love, in the Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition. Buoyed by a multidisciplinary background which has taken her from poetry to dance, journalism, photography and back to poetry again, Bäck first made her name in the film world with two documentary shorts before shooting her debut feature film, Psychosis in Stockholm, which focuses on an intense, symbiotic mother-daughter relationship. In her second fiction feature, Bäck is once again focusing on a relationship, but this time between a couple. Adopting an approach that’s both clinical and dreamlike, sharp and humorous, the director homes in on a woman and a man in the throes of an existential crisis which ends up changing their lives forever, turning their calm family routine into a desperate fight for survival.

Hypnotherapist Kate, the film’s protagonist (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen), is living a happy life with her husband, Orla (Simon Sears), and their daughter, Athena, but she’s hiding an enormous secret which she hasn’t shared with anyone: for three years now, she’s been conducting a romantic (and pseudosexual) affair with another man called Andreas (Anders Danielsen Lie). After years of subterfuge, secrets and ironclad rules to keep up the pretence of a harmless relationship, her double life ends when Andreas is transferred to his mother’s homeland, Greece. Forced to face up to a secret that’s eating her up inside and falling victim to social judgement and self-censorship, Kate feels like she’s suffocating. Plagued by guilt, asphyxiating social norms and repressed desires, the film’s protagonist fights hard to understand the true meaning of “love”. But who will help and support her if she falls and loses her way?

As stated by the director herself, the film looks to be a mirror reflecting the solitude and the determination of a soul who suddenly finds herself intoxicated by love. This burning sensation consumes the protagonist, but it doesn’t actually destroy her. Instead, it drives her to reflect on the life she’s built for herself, based on sacrosanct heteronormative rules and unspeakable secrets. Even when Kate decides to tell a group of women at her church about her secret life, their reaction is brutal, as if she’s crossed some kind of symbolic line which shouldn’t ever be overstepped. Judged by society and, subsequently, by her family, Kate finds herself having to radically reassess her priorities so as not to be annihilated by a conformist world which is looking to reclaim her.

With Brave New Love, Bäck reflects on the rules and expectations which are part and parcel of heteronormative families, and she does so with a healthy dose of much-needed lightness and humour. It doesn’t matter that the protagonist makes mistakes, that her decisions increasingly complicate her everyday life, or that her daughter is rebelling against her; what makes her so appealing is her unstoppable thirst for freedom, and the fact that she ultimately chooses the path she must take, without worrying about other people’s judgement.

The story is told from Kate’s viewpoint, but the film focuses exclusively on a fairly classic example of a secret, romantic, heterosexual affair which resolves itself almost by magic thanks to the protagonist becoming pregnant. It’s a rushed and normative happy ending which detracts from the film’s complexity and limits its rebellious potential. But Brave New Love is nonetheless an intriguing film, because it speaks of desire and freedom from the viewpoint of a protagonist who suddenly seems to awaken from a soothing yet suffocating torpor. The film allows us to dream of different kinds of human, family and romantic relationships, which is a good start. Now it’s up to the audience to create their own anti-normative utopias.

Brave New Love was produced by Snowglobe (Denmark) and is sold worldwide by Reinvent Yellow Sales ApS.

(Translated from Italian)