The Nordic region’s largest film festival, Göteborg Film Festival, is set to return this year between 28th January – 6th February in cinemas and online through their digital service, Draken Film, hosted on the Magine Pro platform.

Due to the pandemic, last year’s 2021 edition of the Film Festival became an almost exclusively digital event. At the time, we spoke with Olle Agebro, Head of Acquisition at Draken Film, about the pandemic’s impact on the annual Göteborg Film Festival and the challenges and opportunities they faced pivoting the festival from a traditional event to a digital one for the first time. You can get more insight into planning and project by reading our full interview with Olle here. 

In this year’s announcement of the hybrid festival experience, Mirja Wester, CEO of Göteborg Film Festival, said, “After a shaky year, to say the least, it feels fantastic to be able to once again welcome the audience back into the cinemas. However, due to the enormous impact of last year’s digital edition on visitors in all Swedish municipalities, we will focus on developing both physical and digital meeting spaces between films and audiences in 2022. We are now designing the format of the film festival for the future”.

The flexibility of Magine Pro’s OTT platform has enabled Göteborg Film Festival to extend Draken Film’s capabilities to serve as a digital host in 2021 and again in 2022. The festival launches on a dedicated page across all devices within the Draken Film service, with a well-curated selection of over 50 films available to stream. Online visitors will also have access to exclusive interviews, festival atmosphere and digital meetings with filmmakers. And to recreate the atmosphere of a festival premiere for the audience watching from home, three new films will premiere in parallel every day, both in the cinemas (16 screens around Gothenburg) and on Draken Film.

As part of this year’s theme for the festival, Disorder, Göteborg Film Festival will also invite audiences during three exclusive screenings to be hypnotized. The Hypnotic Cinema is a unique experiment involving a hypnotist performing mass hypnosis to transform the audience’s state of mind according to the mood and theme of the specific film. After the screening, the hypnotist will break the hypnosis and examine what happens with the film experience if you dare to lose control over your consciousness by being hypnotized.

This isn’t the first time, Göteborg Film Festival has explored some unusual social experiments. For example, during last years festival, a Swedish nurse spent a week watching the festival isolated in a lighthouse in the North Sea. And in 2019, some audience members could participate in ‘coffin screenings’, which involved watching films inside a locked sarcophagus.

To find out more about Göteborg Film Festival 2022 online and in-person festival, including details about The Hypnotic Cinema and Draken Film, head here. You can also learn more about how Magine Pro has enabled Draken Film to serve as a digital host for Göteborg Film Festival online here.

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