Jens Östberg is a Swedish director and scriptwriter.
Jens Östberg was born in 1971 in Uppsala, Sweden. An elite level footballer in his teens, he took up ballet at 17. After winning the prestigious Bagnolet Award in Paris in 1994, his career as a choreographer took off, resulting in 40+ works for, among others, the Bayerisches Staatsballett, the Nederlands Dans Theater 1, and the Cullberg Ballet. Jens has served as head of the master’s program in choreography at the School of Dance and Circus, and as artistic director for The Away Team, a theatre group.
In 2009, his short film Small Game received an honorable mention at the Gothenburg International Film Festival. He wrote and directed his feature film debut “Blowfly Park”, which premiered in 2014 and received two Swedish Academy Award nominations; Peter Andersson for Best Supporting Actor, and Best Actor, which Sverrir Gudnason won. Gudnason also won Best Actor at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival for his work in Blowfly Park.
More recently, Östberg has taken up writing screenplays for other directors, such as the adaptation of Stefan Spjut’s novel Stallo for director Mikael Marcimain, as well as directing series episodes for other showrunners.
In 2019, he was the head writer and director on the dramedy series “Filip & Mona”, which won Best Comedy Series at the Swedish Comedy Awards. Combining his experience in both sports and dance, he was the football choreographer on “I Am Zlatan”, a 2021 feature film about Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the footballer.
In 2023 the crime drama series “Taelgia” will be released, a project that he initiated, wrote and directed. He’s currently developing a number of projects, such as the feature film “Intruder”.