The Hypnotic Cinema
Goteborg Film Festival
Issue 62 | March 2022
Agency
Stendahls
Creative Team
Art Director Alexander Skoglund Copywriter Mikael Andersson Jr. Art Director Sofia Malmborg Jr. Copywriter Molly Ljungstrom
Production Team
Project Manager Anna Lotto Production Company Is This It
Other Credits
Account Director Peter Ohlsson PR Company Manifest Client Goteborg Film Festival CEO Mirja Wester Head of Marketing Marie Murphy Head of Communications Andreas Degerhammar Head of Event Emma Rygielski Press Co-ordinator Emmy Westling
Date
January 2022
Background
A conflict at home, trouble at work, a pending Tinder date, all of these can affect how you watch films at the cinema. Quality films deserve better. They deserve your undivided attention.
Idea
Gothenburg Film Festival invited the audience to a mind-bending experiment.
Cinemagoers were invited to subject themselves to hypnosis before a screening at the festival. A hypnotist would set up audiences to get the most out of ‘Memoria’, starring Tilda Swinton, political satire ‘Land of Dreams’ and psychological thriller ‘Speak No Evil’.
The intention was to intensify the film experience for those brave enough to give up control of their own thoughts.
Results
Not completed yet but so far: massive media attention all over the world from CNN, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Independent, Wired, The Guardian, Telegraph, NME and many more.
TV and radio news coverage in Sweden.
The three hypnotic screenings were sold out in two days.
Our Thoughts
The Gothenburg Film festival has built itself an international reputation with a series of stunts. A couple of years ago they locked movie-goers inside coffins and last year they sent a woman off to watch the films all by herself at a remote lighthouse. No distractions, you see. This year the same idea was realised through mass hypnotism, which was justified by the claim the festival wanted to “raise questions about submission, transgression and control.” Hard to know if it would have brought in record audiences because Covid reduced numbers to just a few dozen. Viewers reported that hypnotist Fredrik Praesto did induce within them sensations from stupor to intensified concentration. A partial success as an experiment, then, but wholly successful as an exercise in PR.