Tomas Mattias Löw


Mattias Löw is a Swedish film director, documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Stockholm and Motala, who specializes in social issues documentaries and documentary photography. He gives lectures and workshops on the topics of storytelling and documentary filmmaking, in addition to occasional acting.

Life and career

1990s

Beginning his career in the early 1990s as a short film and music video director, Mattias Löw studied cinema arts and history at Stockholm University and screenwriting for film and TV at UCLA – University of California, Los Angeles.
Upon return to his native Sweden from Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Mattias turned to documentaries and has won acclaim from critics and audiences alike, and been the recipient of several international television, film and journalism awards as well as arts grants and stipends for his social-, educational- and sport-themed documentaries primarily made for Swedish public broadcaster SVT – Sveriges Television and Canadian public broadcaster CBC Television – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

2000s

Since 2008 Mattias Löw collaborates with Sweden's number one adventure destination, the ephemeral Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Swedish Laponia, making documentary shorts about the artists and designers creating a temporary hotel made out of snow and sculpted blocks of ice.

2010s

In June 2010 Mattias Löw released The Referee, a highly controversial SVT – Sveriges Television documentary film about the Swedish FIFA referee Martin Hansson and his tumultuous road to ref at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Martin Hansson was the referee in the dramatic second of two 2009 Republic of Ireland v France football matches during the playoffs for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Mattias Löw's documentary TV-series The Other Sport made for SVT – Sveriges Television about the development of women's football since the 1960s was released in time for UEFA Women's Euro 2013 which was played in Sweden. The series centers around former and present football stars Pia Sundhage, Marta Vieira da Silva, Lotta Schelin, Kosovare Asllani, Gunilla Paijkull, Anette Börjesson and Elisabeth Leidinge among others. The three episode limited series attracted over a million TV-viewers in Sweden.
January 2015 Mattias Löw received Svenska Spel and the Swedish Sportjournalist Federation's Grant at the Swedish Sports Award – Svenska idrottsgalan.
In 2015, his documentary film All the World in a Design School created headlines and political debate as it criticized the introduction of steep tuition fees for non-European students at Swedish universities. The film follows a Turkish and a Chinese student during a study year at one of the world's top-ranked industrial design schools, UID – Umeå Institute of Design.
2016, Mattias Löw released the one-hour documentary The Indian Priest about Raphael Kurian, on a reverse mission. Raphael is a Catholic priest from Kerala in south India arriving in secular Sweden, and the documentary emphasizes the reversing of the direction of earlier missionary efforts.
Mattias Löw's photopoetry exhibition Aatman – The Universal Spirit with images from the annual Burning Man counterculture event in Black Rock Desert, Nevada debuted at Linköping Art Gallery in November 2018. The exhibition was the first large scale public art gallery display of photographs from Burning Man in Sweden. Part of the exhibition is on permanent display in Vallastaden, Linköping.
At the beginning of 2019 Mattias Löw guided a group of recently arrived refugees in a photography exhibition at Linköping Art Gallery. The works showed a reality of asylum seeking youth arriving in Sweden during the European migrant crisis.

2020s

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in India Mattias Löw created the photo-essay exhibition 98 Days • Frozen in Fear, dealing with worry, uncertainty and social distancing during the 2020 lockdown. A digital exhibition with online viewing rooms of the project first appeared at Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen, Denmark during June, 2020.

Works

Exhibitions