Hanna Högstedt is a filmmaker, writer and founding member of Onoma Productions. Högstedt works both in documentary and fiction, mainly as a screenwriter and director. When working with actors, she often works with improvisation. The photographer Nan Goldin once said: ”I want the people in my pictures to stare back.” This is a constant inspiration, also as Högstedt recently made her first feature as cinematographer, in Ami-Ro Sköld's The Store.

A cancelled screening & talk of Högstedt’s film Burka Songs 2.0 became the start of a huge debate, where the film’s muslim activist participants, and the activists who supported them, were declared “undemocratic”, and where the limits between culture and political rule were intensively discussed. This also sparked a series of talks and legal processes concerning terms like “extremist”, and who gets labeled as such.

The questions of who can belong where, and how we see each other from different perspectives, remain central themes in Högstedt’s filmmaking. These threads continue in her upcoming feature My French Revolution, a story about a first big love between a blond Swedish girl and a French girl with Algerian roots.

Högstedt is regularly contributing to Tankar för dagen in the Swedish Radio, and also to magazines, anthologies and daily press. Her most recent text was a speech performed with Anna Linder at Havremagasinet in Boden at the opening of Linder’s exhibition Colere.