Sweden’s Gothenburg Festival to experiment with mass hypnosis of audiences
SwedenThe Gothenburg Film Festival is known for the social experiments it does on its audience – and the 2022 edition will be no different.
For this year’s event, the festival will experiment with mass hypnosis in an attempt to “transform the audience’s state of mind according to the mood and theme” of each film.
Films that will be shown at the 2022 festival include Apichatpong Weerasethakuls Memoria with Tilda Swinton and Christian Tafdrup’s psychological thriller Speak no evil.
Gothenburg’s artistic director Jonas Holmberg said that the experiment is intended to “raise questions about submission, violation and control”.
In a trailer for Gotebergs Hypnotic Cinema, potential participants are asked: “Do you dare to let go of control?” The experiment is meanwhile described as “mind-bending”.
In previous years, the Goteberg audience has been locked in coffins to test the boundaries of claustrophobia, while the notion of social isolation was taken to a new level when a single viewer was stranded for a week on an island in the North Sea.
The selected film enthusiast spent seven days in total isolation on the island of Hamneskär, sleeps in Pater Noster, a former lighthouse that has been converted into luxury housing and a cinema.
The guest was not allowed to bring a computer, telephone or even a book to the island. “You can watch the waves and you can watch the movies,” Holmberg said then.
Gothenburg starts on January 28, 2022 and will contain more than 200 films from 80 countries.