Gerd Osten was an important Swedish film critic who ultimately turned to that profession after numerous failed attempts to become a filmmaker. In Mamma, Suzanne Osten—her daughter, who unlike her mother would go on to become a filmmaker and a central figure in her country’s cultural life—tells the story of a woman (clearly based on Gerd) who, between the late 1930s and the 1940s, persistently tries to make films in a Sweden occupied by Nazi Germany.