Frida Kempff, born in 1977 in Sala, Sweden, is a director and screenwriter renowned for her sensitive and deeply human perspective on the stories she portrays. After studying at the prestigious Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Art, she began her career in television before turning to short films and documentaries, with a constant focus on the themes of vulnerability, memory, isolation, and dreams.

She gained international attention in 2010 with “Bathing Micky” (Micky Bader), a short documentary about an elderly woman who is a member of a swimming club. The film earned her the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, making her the first Swedish woman since 1957 to win an award in the official short film competition.

She continued with the short fiction “While You Were Gone” (2011), about the complex relationship between a father and his son, then “Circles” (2015), a documentary about the return to Stockholm of a former volunteer of Médecins Sans Frontières. That same year marked her transition to feature films with the documentary “Winter Buoy“, an immersion into a support program for pregnant women in precarious situations in Toronto. The film was critically acclaimed and screened at numerous international festivals (Gothenburg, Hot Docs, IDFA, etc.), notably winning the Best Documentary award at the Nordic International Film Festival in the United States.

Frida Kempff continues to explore fiction through the short films “Dear Kid” (2016), about a mother suspecting abuse in a swimming club, and “Wolf” (2017), an allegorical fable about the intrusion of nature into the domestic space.

Her first feature film, “Knocking” (Knackningar, 2021), is a claustrophobic psychological thriller centered on a woman recently released from a psychiatric hospital who hears strange sounds in her apartment building. The film was selected for the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival and was praised for its immersive direction and social commentary on marginalization and the perception of the feminine.

In 2024, Kempff returned with “The Swedish Torpedo” (Den svenska torpeden), a historical drama co-written with Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten, about Sally Bauer, the first Scandinavian woman to swim across the English Channel in 1939. Far from a conventional biopic, the film takes a contemporary, feminist approach to the life of this liberated woman, single mother, and top athlete at a time when this was the exception. The film had its world premiere in the Centrepiece section of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Inspired by powerful, often invisible figures and by intimate issues with profound political significance, Kempff draws on her documentary background to anchor her stories in a form of sensory truth. In her own words, becoming a mother was a creative trigger, fueling her films with this tension between personal aspirations and social constraints. She advocates a cinema with a unique perspective, often centered on a character, capturing their doubts, their inner struggles, and their need for freedom—whether embodied by Molly in “Knocking” or Sally in “The Swedish Torpedo“.

His works have been screened and awarded prizes at major international festivals, including Cannes, Sundance, Telluride, London, Palm Springs, Gothenburg and Stockholm.