Lighthouse at the end of the world
Fellow film fans, are your souls now completely crushed due to the lack of real live film festivals to go to?
My own experience has been strangely mixed. My in-person film festival attendance had pretty much dwindled to infrequent attendance even before the onset of the pandemic. That meant that, with the lockdowns, it actually became easier for me to attend film festivals because so many of them moved partly or completely online. In that situation, all you need is a good robust internet connection and a decent TV screen and speakers. Well, there is something else you need: uninterrupted time.
When you take off for a far-off city and check into a hotel, you’re in a position to dedicate whole days to film viewing. When you do it at home, you save money on travel and hotel expenses, but you are, well, at home. Unless you are unfortunate enough to be a homeless person, you likely live with other people and have all the chores and distractions that come with that. Or if you are trying to write your sixth novel, you may be ridden with guilt over taking time to watch too many movies.
Still, if you are a die-hard film fan, this move to online screenings may represent a welcome opportunity. Think about it. If you have the time to virtually “attend” a film festival, you may theoretically have your pick of any fest in the entire world. Geographical location is no longer a barrier. Or is it? It turns out that, when it comes to cross-border streaming, the issue of international rights tends to rear its ugly head. I have had no problem dipping into screenings for, say, the Cork International Film Festival, but when I check out festivals in other countries, I encounter messages such as this one on the website of Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival: “The festival can only be streamed in Sweden.”
Of course, if you follow the news, then you know that, in the case of that particular film festival (which screened 70 films over the course of eleven days ending February 8), streaming was not actually the most optimal way of viewing. The organizers of that fest took an imaginatively unique approach. Rather than sell tickets to a large number of people, they gave away one ticket to one person. More accurately, they put out a call for a solitary volunteer to watch the entire film festival. The catch? The films would be screened in a former lighthouse turned boutique hotel on the island of Hamneskär, accessible only by a small boat and located on the very edge of a North Sea archipelago in one of Sweden’s most barren and windswept locations during the dark and stormy wintertime. The volunteer would not be allowed to bring a phone or other method of communication. A psychiatrist would be on standby, though, just in case.
The organizers were unsure whether they would get any applications. They received more than 12,000 from 45 countries. The lucky selectee was a pink-haired emergency nurse called Lisa Enroth. Given her line of work and the situation the world is in, one cannot help but be happy for her and for the escape this provided her. I confess to envying her.
So instead of the 160,000 who attended last year’s Göteborg Film Festival, the 44th edition of the festival had only one attendee. Well, not quite. The screenings were still also held in the usual venue, the Draken Cinema, where a single ticket was sold for each screening. And that was it—except for invited guests like certain filmmakers, producers or actors who were also on hand to speak about their work.
“During this pandemic, so many people have turned to cinema when in isolation,” said Jonas Holmberg, the festival’s artistic director. “But the pandemic has also changed how we experience films.”
“I should have had someone there to cling onto,” commented Ms. Enroth in a video diary after having watched the tragic Italian drama The Macaluso Sisters.
“It is easy to understand how she feels,” noted The Economist magazine in an article, “alone on a rocky outpost. Yet such sentiments have long been common all over Sweden. Half of Swedish households are single-person ones.”
Is this not life imitating art imitating life? The oeuvre of Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman has long been honored in film festivals everywhere. Now it’s as though, in his honor, a film festival has transformed itself into an Ingmar Bergman film.
Congratulations to Lisa Enroth for her work on the front lines—but also for being a stand-in for every film fan in the world who ever dreamed of having his or her own private film festival in the most dramatic of conditions.
-S.L., 23 February 2021
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