Her eye for dark drama and her experience as a director of actors saw Hollywood come calling, with Sieling spending some years in Los Angeles directing the American remake of The Bridge, and other series which required a little of that Nordic noir to rub off, including Homeland, Lovecraft Country and Wayward Pines.

Around this television directing work have been a handful of feature films, including the historical drama Margrete: Queen of the North, about the 15th-century monarch who united the Scandinavian countries.

Trine Dyrholm stars as Queen Regent Margrete, architect of the Kalmar Union that kept Sweden, Denmark and Norway together as a northern power.

By the year 1402, Margrete was ruling the Union as the puppet-master of her adopted son, King Erik, and the film imagines the machinations around a report in the historical record of a possible pretender to the throne.

With King Erik (Morten Hee Andersen) struggling to hold the Union's various princedoms and kingdoms together under his mother's wise counsel, an escaped prisoner from the German kingdoms, known as the Man from Graudenz (Jakob Oftebro), is brought to the castle.

Some of the older people at court immediately bow in the presence of this man, and recognise him as the former king, Margrete's son who had apparently been lost to the plague 15 years earlier.

Hard decisions stand before Queen Margrete and King Erik - to recognise the king, to try the pretender with treason, and to wonder if this all isn't some cunning distraction from war rumours coming at them from the European continent.

Sieling spent a decade slowly researching and writing, with a couple of collaborators, the screenplay about Margrete.

"I knew I wanted to embrace her," Sieling says over a Zoom call from her home in the countryside outside Copenhagen.

"When my producer called me after reading these three lines in a book about this false king claiming to have been captured for 15 years, I thought, okay, this could be a great Shakespearean entrance," she says.

Sieling worked on a number of drafts with Jesper Fink, and then brought in Maya Ilsoe close to the shooting date when they were worried they'd lost their sense of Margrete's character - feeling too close to the material after nine drafts.

The filmmaker describes directing a film as being like a snowball, with her crew and collaborators working on their respective areas and coming to her for advice.

"I'm the person who brings [the] script, we talk, and then I just need to keep it rolling downhill and I just need to push it a little bit all the time so everybody is going in the same direction," Sieling says.

"Actually it's such a long process that I like to just trust in the chaos."

There are some seriously talented artists among this crew. Notably, the cinematography by Rasmus Videbaek is stunning,

We chat about her writing process - Sieling describes herself as a very collaborative writer, and very open to criticism and notes from friends and professional readers.

"When you're writing, getting notes [is] always the fuel to make it better and better," she says.

She describes this engagement with criticism as coming from her performance background - Sieling was already a noted actress with a decade of credits before she enrolled in film school.

Sieling recalls that as a working actress she had already gotten comfortable with taking on notes about her work, but in her first weeks at film school her fellow students, without that experience, did not initially handle the criticism well, with many tears involved.

For many producers, it is Sieling's experience as a performer that makes her such a strong actors' director.

"That is definitely why I stayed in the United States for so long, because the actors really liked to be directed by somebody who knew a lot about what it is they're really doing."

Sieling has drawn a cadre of actors around her with whom she enjoys working. SBS On Demand viewers might recognise Jakob Oftebro, star of the television series Agent Hamilton.

Sieling has another longtime collaborator, Soren Malling, playing Peder, the agent of the church advising Queen Margrete, and she has cast the two gentlemen again in a new film that is still being developed.

I ask if the film will be all moody and atmospheric, as that's obviously her thing, and she laughs.

"I'm definitely drawn to that," she says, "though I'm drawn to comedy too but it would probably have to be grounded in a tragedy somehow."

Margrete: Queen of the North is now in cinemas.