Swedish Film Festival to gift one film fan a chance to watch movies on an isolated island for 7 days
Lighthouse on remote island Pater Noster
In a first, Sweden’s Goteborg Film Festival is set to carry a social distancing experiment keeping in mind the pandemic. It is touted to be cinema’s ultimate social distancing experiment with a film fan winning the chance to view shortlisted films on a remote island.
For its 2021 edition, the Goteborg Film Festival will have a single film fan to spend 7 days alone on an isolated island in the North Sea with only films for company. The film fan will be chosen among all applicants who can currently apply at Goteborg’s website for the same.
The chosen applicant will be sent to Pater Noster, a small, rocky island off Sweden's west coast, to stay in a converted lighthouse (now a boutique luxury hotel).
The Swedish festival will set up a screening room in the lighthouse where the visitor can screen up to 60 films, all from the official 2021 Göteborg line-up.
"You have everything you need — great food, great drink, a nice bed — this isn't about survival. But you can't bring anything with you: no phone, no computer, not even a book," says Göteborg festival artistic director Jonas Holmberg. "You can watch the waves and you can watch the films." Holmberg says the successful applicant will meet a few criteria: "They have to be a film enthusiast; they have to agree to record a daily video blog about the experiment; and they have to be emotionally and psychologically suited to spend a week in this kind of isolation."
On the idea, Holmberg said, "We are all watching films in isolation now and that changes our relationship with movies," and added, "we have seen new types of films resonate in this lockdown period, and films take on a different meaning. A scene where people hug a stranger feels very different in a moment when you can't do that yourself."
The 2021 Göteborg festival will be held online between January 29 – February 8. It will also offer isolated, one-person film screenings at the Draken cinema in Göteborg and at the Scandinavium arena, the city's 12,000-capacity ice hockey stadium.
Keeping up with the coronavirus pandemic, Göteborg Film Festival will have a special festival focus on the theme of social distances, featuring films that examine the impact the pandemic has had on the world and our perspective of it. They include Molecules, Andrea Segre’s new documentary shot in Venice before and during the first lockdown period.
