Renowned artistic director of Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival Jonas Holmberg will be stepping down after 10 years of being at the head of the festivals as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
Holmberg stepped into the role in 2014 as the successor of Marit Kapla and went on to lead the festival to incredible success, even helping it become the first A-list film festival to achieve true equality between films directed by men and women in 2020. He also introduced many gimmicks to keep attendees interested through the years, with one of the most notable being “coffin cinema,” where a viewer would be locked in a specially designed coffin, and a film would be projected to the inside.
Other gimmicks that Holmberg came up with consisted of a COVID-era social distancing project, in which one film fan would be watching films for a week in a converted lighthouse off the coast of Sweden, and a screening involving mass hypnosis by a professional hypnotist on gala audiences just last year.
“Next festival will be my tenth as artistic director. It has been a difficult decision, but it feels like a good moment to step aside,” Holmberg states. “We have successfully navigated through the pandemic, and both Göteborg Film Festival, alongside our industry platforms Nordic Film Market and TV Drama Vision, as well as Draken Film, are thriving. I will be leaving colleagues whom I admire and have learned a lot from, but before that, we will organize one last festival together. We are working intensively to shape the 47th Göteborg Film Festival into something amazing.”
The 47th Annual Göteborg Film Festival will run next year from January 26th to February 4th and will bring in 2,000 attendees from the film industry.
Leave a Comment