A love triangle story rooted in three decades of personal reflection will meet its first audience on Sunday, August 9, when Swedish-Danish writer-director Maria Bäck's feature Brave New Love world-premieres in the main international competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland (The Hollywood Reporter).

The film centres on Kate, a mother caught between her husband Orla and a secret relationship with another man, Andreas. Kathrine Thorborg Johansen plays Kate, Simon Sears plays Orla, and Anders Danielsen Lie takes the role of Andreas. Noemi Carbone Mannov appears as the couple's daughter Athena, with Angeliki Papoulia also in the cast. Snowglobe Film produced the picture, with Anna-Maria Kantarius as producer, Maria Von Hausswolff as cinematographer, and Julius Krebs Damsbo as editor (The Hollywood Reporter). Reinvent Yellow is handling international sales — the company that shops the film to distributors in territories worldwide.

Brave New Love is a Denmark, Sweden, and Greece co-production, running 105 minutes in Danish, Norwegian, and Greek (Locarno Film Festival programme). The festival schedules the world premiere at 18:00 in L'altra Sala, with a second screening on August 10 and a free-admission Q&A at the Forum @Spazio Cinema (Locarno Film Festival). The film screens in colour DCP — the standard digital cinema format used at virtually every major festival.

Bäck drew on her own life for the story. She told The Hollywood Reporter that 30 years of being in and out of relationships, and her fascination with how hard people find it to confront their own habits, shaped the screenplay. She noted that little has changed regarding the rules of love in modern times. Crucially, she said the film is not recommending open relationships — she does not have one herself — and that the story is concerned with shame and the ingrained ideas that gather around a mother who falls in love with another man (The Hollywood Reporter).

Bäck's earlier work includes I Remember When I Die and Psychosis in Stockholm, the latter released in 2020. The Locarno festival's programme lists her filmography as Psychosis in Stockholm (2020) and Brave New Love (2026), and notes that she is developing her fourth feature while expanding Brave New Love into a novel (Locarno Film Festival).

Snowglobe Film unveiled the official poster and confirmed the competition slot on its Facebook page on July 29 (Snowglobe Film, Facebook), with a parallel announcement on Instagram.

The Concorso Internazionale — Locarno's headline competition section — is where the festival's top prize, the Golden Leopard, is decided. Brave New Love screens in that section alongside the rest of this year's selected titles, with the full lineup published on the festival's official programme page (Locarno Film Festival). For a film with international sales still open, a competition slot at a major European festival is the most visible shop window a new title can get.