Eric Michel Nilsson was born in Brussels in 1935, he moved to Sweden at the age of 15.

Nilsson was educated in directing at the reputable film school IDHEC in Paris. In the early 1960s, he came to be a part of the then newly started department of documentary film at SVT, and it was in television that Eric M Nilsson got the opportunity to develop his associative pictorial storytelling. A variety and mix of genres are unmistakable in Nilsson’s work: essay films as Anonym and Åtgärdas alongside documentaries as Djurgårdsfärjan, and the experimentation in form in Passageraren, Brutal, and Ormgard. The common denominator is mistrust in language and an interest in the creation of meaning in the relations between words and images.

In the films of Eric M Nilsson there is consistently a playful approach, and at the same time, a critic of the medium’s illusory qualities and its ability to trick its viewers.