BIOGRAPHY
BJÖRN BABBA CALLIUS
The survivor
Björn Babba Callius
The filmmaker and photographer who loses 30% of his brain in a car accident gets back up and makes a documentary film and a talk about the life-threatening event.
A lecture about where you find the strength and inspiration to get up after tough setbacks.
​
In 1998, the photographer Björn Babba Callius lived and worked a successful life as an artist photographer in New York. Fifty meters before he was supposed to meet his girlfriend to jointly say a final goodbye to the mother of his girlfriend, his life changes completely. In a fraction of a second.
Babba is hit by a car at high speed. He is thrown into the air. Breaks approximately ten bones, several of the body bloodveins are torn off and he cracks the skull!
This is when the real fight begins.
With 30% of his brain physically removed, Babba decides to return to professional life on the same terms as before.
Time and time again, he defies what the doctors assessed as a likely development.
Because Babba knows that everything is possible.
• Three months after the accident photographs a wedding.
​
• The same day he leaves his wheelchair.
​
• Five months after Babba wakes up from his coma, he runs regularly in the three-kilometer exercise track.
• 18 months after the accident, which occurred in New York, but half the hospital stay was in Sweden, was Babba back in his beloved New York City.
2016 he is invited to speak at the inauguration of the hospital in Sweden where he spent most of his hospital stay. He did so by producing the strong, honest documentary Babba The Journey.
The success story of the survivor Babba, with the film Babba The Journey, has now become a talk about the strength the individual can accumulate in crisis situations. Babbas humor and ability to, even during the critical phases of rehabilitation, oscillate between living 100% in the present or completely disregarding the odds of regaining the life he was faced with, run like a red thread through the talk.
The lecture is interspersed with clips from the film whose serious theme is softened by Babbas detached gallows humor with his brutally honest lifestyle.
​
​