The isolated cinema: Goteborg Film Festival to send one person to remote island for week of screenings

The festival is inviting a single cinephile to a remote, uninhabited island to watch 60 films in a unique – if desolate – experiment

Goteborg Film Festival will send one cinephile to the remote island of Pater Noster, where they can spend seven days in total isolation watching films. Supplied

If you can't abide the sound of someone loudly munching popcorn or slurping on a soft drink as they watch the latest blockbuster, then this could be for you.

Sweden's Goteborg Film Festival is inviting one cinephile to spend an entire week alone on a remote, uninhabited island in the North Sea, watching the festival's entire slate of titles.

The winner will spend seven days on the lighthouse island of Pater Noster, off the coast of Sweden, with only 60 films and the sound of crashing waves for company.

The film fan will stay at the converted lighthouse, which is now a boutique hotel, with a special screening room set up for a week of binge-viewing.

No phones will be allowed, with the solitary film enthusiast required to make daily reports about the films they have viewed, as well as the experience of being secluded in the windswept location.

The social-distancing-friendly concept was inspired by the pandemic's effect on the film industry, with cinemas shuttered around the world for much of 2020.

Though Goteborg Film Festival's 2021 programme will be made up of digital screenings and talks, the event will also host isolated film screenings, for a single viewer, at Gothenburg's 12,000-seat Scandinavium arena and the city's Draken cinema.

"The creation of isolated film experiences for single-person audiences at iconic sites is a way of ensuring entirely safe festival screenings, but it is also an attempt to process how the pandemic has changed people’s relationships with film," says the festival's artistic director, Jonas Holmberg.

"The sensation of being utterly alone in the Scandinavium arena or Draken cinema ties in with the altered relationship people now have to all those places that normally buzz with activity but are now deserted."

Tickets for the screenings at Scandinavium and Draken will be raffled among visitors who register on the festival website, while those who want to spend a week on Pater Noster, must apply online.

Shortlisted applicants will be interviewed, with the winner heading to the island on Saturday, January 30.

The Goteborg Film Festival will take place online between Friday, January 29 and Monday, February 8, with the full programme released on Tuesday, January 12.

More information is available at goteborgfilmfestival.se