Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival is inviting one cinema enthusiast to spend seven days on a lighthouse island, with only movies and the North Sea for company.
The chosen fan will be transported by boat to the Swedish island of Pater Noster — which Göteborg Film Festival artistic director Jonas Holmberg calls “one of the most beautiful and dramatic places I know.” Once there, they’ll be set up in the former lighthouse keeper’s house and spend a week from January 30 to February 6 watching Göteborg’s offerings. They won’t be allowed a cellphone, a laptop, a book or any other distractions. “We are interested in how the audience’s relationship to films changes under those circumstances, and wanted to explore this relationship by taking it to the extreme — isolating one person on a small rock in the sea for one week with films as the only company,” says Holmberg. If you’re interested, you can apply online, all you have to do is email and say who you are and why you’re interested in the Isolated Cinema. The deadline is January 17, and the film festival said it’s already had an influx of applicants from across the world. Pater Noster is actually the name of the cast iron, bright red lighthouse that’s been a feature of the tiny island of Hamneskär since 1868. Holmberg says a lighthouse keeper lived on the island in the cottage until the 1960s when the beacon was automated.
