Mattias Olsson

Catch Mattias Olsson on Do Radio: Where To Next? with Mike Warwick 28th September - 4th October 2026.

Mattias Olsson is a Swedish documentary filmmaker based in Järna, whose work asks what happens when a camera is used to capture stillness rather than chase a story. After moving to New York at twenty-two and building a career as a fashion photographer, he fell for documentary film at Human Rights Watch's annual festival - a love that deepened into reckoning when he watched the September 11th attacks unfold from his rooftop, and again, years later, when new fatherhood and a chance encounter with Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity cracked open the question that has driven him since: how did we get here, and how do we find our way back to the earth, to each other and to ourselves?

In 2017 he left the funders, commissioners and co-productions of the film industry behind and founded Campfire Stories, an independent, Patreon-supported film and podcast project run on gift-economy principles - no paywall, just films offered freely and kept alive by whoever finds them worth supporting. Working without a script or a brief lets him follow instinct rather than pitch: Into the Soil, a portrait of biodynamic grower Bridget, began with little more than five loose clues about a woman he'd never met. A Tale from the Woods and Once Upon a Forest turned his camera on Sweden's clear-cut forests and on Maria, "the Twig Poet," who is learning to let deadwood regenerate her bark-beetle-ravaged land. His new film, Kinfolk, released this September, weaves Maria's story together with the voice of the Indian activist Vandana Shiva and the history of the Chipko tree-hugging movement.

Underpinning it all is a conviction, borrowed in part from Eisenstein's "story of interbeing," that we are not separate from nature but a part of it - and that storytelling can shift that understanding, one film and one small step at a time. Rather than trade in the fear and urgency that dominate most media, Mattias makes space for wonder, patience and what he calls "solutions-focused" storytelling: proof that another way of living is not only possible but already under way in places like Järna and Totnes.

In conversation with Mike, recorded at the Bull Inn in Totnes, Mattias traces the long road from a rooftop in Manhattan to a forest in Järna, taking in clear-cutting and coppicing, the gift economy and the quiet discipline of a ten o'clock coffee - and why he thinks of himself these days less as a filmmaker than as a kind of fungus, the quiet mycelial thread connecting one story to the next.