
Ester Martin Bergsmark
Directing
Known For

A gritty story taking place in Stockholm, about the passionate love between the self-abusive Sebastian who wants to be a woman, and the easy-going Andreas who is certainly not gay.
Something Must Break

Filmmaker Ester Martin Bergsmark interrogates their response to a transphobic slur hurled at them following their move to Berlin. Exploring the root of violence and its nature, this is a powerful meditation on the trans experience and a treatise on how to move forward from fear.
A Sweetness from Nowhere

A queer metaphysical love story that weaves itself through real and imagined sexual encounters across darkrooms, forest cruising zones and highway shoulders. In these fantastical playgrounds, bodies are free to imagine themselves in a multiplicity of forms as they encounter other bodies without preconceived notions of what those other bodies desire, what they will need, and how they should be touched. While trusting the energetic attraction of bodies towards each other and learning through the encounter, INSTINCT simultaneously asks: what does it mean for a queer body to actively (un)learn what it might assume about another body's sex, gender, and desire?
Instinct

A portrait of Maggie, through Swedish everyday life. Maggie always co-ordinates high heels with a beret, and she loves gold. She lives on the 15th floor in one of Malmö’s suburbs. Her balcony is littered with reminders of her previous life. Under a golf bag, next to a racing ticket from 1999, are the remains of a pigeon that she killed when she couldn’t sleep.
Maggie in Wonderland

Caught between two genders, the artist Eli Leven and Ester Martin Bergsmark touch and caress each other, while they bath together in clouds of steam. A persuasive voice-off describes the often hard and painful growing process, which led them to choose to be neither males nor females. But something else entirely. While memories of adolescences scarred by homophobia and discrimination are presented, the audience is also captivated by poetic evocations of bodies, of snowy woods, water, nature, and snails: the symbol of androgyny. This movie moves the audience profoundly. It is a hymn to sexual fluidity, which reveals the search for the true self, rendered through the use of contrasting, vivid, and often acid bright photography. Intended as a television portrait of the transgender artist Eli Leven, it is a psychedelic docu-fiction, a hybrid movie inspired by Derek Jarman's Sebastian.
She Male Snails

An existential sugar shock which takes us on a fun, candy-filled roller-coaster ride between cruel violence and extreme cuteness - which prove to be disturbingly close together.
Swedish Candy, Some Violence and a Bit of Cat

A series of jumbled, abrasive, abstract images of a less than glamorous Sweden.
Swallow It

Includes 12 shorts directed by young female artists, directors and feminists to create "12 propositions to rethink pornography".