Mass-hypnosis planned at a major Film Festival. Are you up for it?

The Göteborg Film Festival, Scandinavia’s largest film event, will soon witness a mind-bending exercise named “The Hypnotic Cinema” where audiences will be encouraged to chill and allow themselves to be mass-hypnotised.

The film festival in Sweden had grabbed attention in 2021 when they offered a unique experience in on-site fest screenings in a COVID-19 age. The experimental-experience had a single film enthusiast isolated alone on the North Sea lighthouse island of Pater Noster. With no iPhone nor even a book to read, they had to watch the festival’s 60 premieres over a week.

According to reports, this year’s Hypnotic Cinema’s titles chosen for the unique experiment include Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2021 Cannes Jury Prize winner “Memoria,” starring Tilda Swinton; “Land of Dreams,” from Iran’s Venice Silver Lion winners Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (“Women Without Men”), starring Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, and Isabella Rossellini; and Danish director Christian Tafdrup’.

The festival organisers explained that a hypnotist will conduct a mass hypnosis from the main stage of Göteborg’s Stora Teatern before each screening. After each viewing, the hypnotist will break the trance, adjusting the audience’s state of mind relevant to the film’s tone and content.

A parallel can be drawn between hypnosis and film watching, explains Göteborg Festival artistic director Jonas Holmberg. “Cinema theaters and hypnosis both emerged in the late 19th century. If you look at early cinema – Méliès, Griffith – it’s totally full of hypnosis. I don’t think this is a coincidence. There are very, very big similarities between being hypnotized and watching a film, especially in a cinema theater.”

If this experiment works, it may not be long before cinema goers get themselves hypnotized just to get that ‘filmy-kick’.