Far away from Hollywood, and 160km southwest of Stockholm is the city of Norrköping and home to Crazy Pictures, the film collective set up in 2008 by five high school friends, crazy about genre movies and sci-fi: Olle Tholén, Rasmus Råsmark, Albin Pettersson, Victor Danell and Hannes Krantz.

The famous 5 of small-town Sweden have developed a know-how to create home-made entertaining SFX-VFX-driven films for youth, in a cost-effective way.

After their action-packed short films Poetry for Fish which garnered million views on YouTube, the team with a ‘can do attitude’ created their first feature film The Unthinkable, a thriller disaster movie, made for SEK18.5m (€1.6m), outside the public financing model (see our separate story: CLICK HERE). Picked up by SF Studios, the film ended up selling more than 115,000 tickets in Sweden and was sold to more than 100 territories worldwide.

UFO Sweden which opens on Christmas day in Sweden is their sophomore feature, produced this time on a SEK 38m (€3.4m) budget, in co-production with SF Studios, Film i Väst, SVT, support from the Swedish Film Institute, Norrköping Film Fund, and Nordisk Film & TV Fond. The film was pre-sold by REinvent to several territories including Germany (Telepool), Spain (A Contracorriente Films) and Hungary (Vertigo).

The Stranger Things meets The X-Files Swedish flick follows the young teen rebel Denise, who is placed in foster care after her dad went missing. The young girl who believes her father was kidnapped by UFOs, gets in touch with the local association UFO Sweden. Together, they start to investigate what might have happened to Denise’s dad, with the police never far from them.

In the starring roles are newcomer Inez Dahl Torhaug in her first major screen role, Jesper Barkselius, Eva Melander, Sara Shirpey, Mathias Lithner and Oscar Töringe.

The film has just received a double Guldbagge nomination for the editing (from Crazy Pictures and Fredrik Morheden) and the special effects (Crazy Pictures and Jacob Danell).