Fan­cy a week alone watch­ing movies in a remote lighthouse?

Those untamed dark imag­i­na­tions at the Göte­borg Film Fes­ti­val just can’t stop chart­ing the out­er­most lim­its of sen­sa­tion, at least where cin­e­ma is con­cerned. Around this time last year, in the bliss­ful pre-pan­dem­ic months when con­fine­ment wasn’t such a con­stant hor­ror, they offered a few atten­dees the chance to watch a movie while sealed in a cof­fin for max­i­mum immer­sion – and now they’ve read­ied a new stunt upping an already extreme ante.

An announce­ment from Göte­borg today offers one brave soul the once-in-a-life­time chance to take in a festival’s slate of pro­gram­ming in total iso­la­tion, with a fit­ting­ly dra­mat­ic back­drop. The cho­sen cinephile will be sent to the small island of Ham­neskär off the south­east­ern coast of Swe­den, where they’ll be left for sev­en days with zero human con­tact and up to 60 films from this year’s line-up.

It’s not quite as spar­tan as it sounds; the win­ner will stay in the light­house Pater Nos­ter, the lone archi­tec­tur­al fea­ture on this wind-swept hunk of land, which has been con­vert­ed into a lux­u­ry mini-hotel that will be fur­nished with all the food and crea­ture com­forts they’ll need. The win­ner is free to watch as many or as few movies as they please, pre­sum­ably break­ing up the marathon with inter­ludes spent gaz­ing out at the crash­ing tides from a rocky precipice.

But as leisure goes, this is seri­ous busi­ness. An offi­cial release from the fes­ti­val stip­u­lates that the indi­vid­ual may not bring their phone, com­put­er, not even a book, noth­ing that can dis­tract from the altar of cin­e­ma before which they’ve come to pros­trate. The win­ner will required to record a dai­ly video jour­nal chron­i­cling their odds-on descent into mad­ness, and bet­ter still, the announce­ment spec­i­fies that the win­ner must ​“be emo­tion­al­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly suit­ed to spend a week in this kind of isolation.”

To some, this will sound like a fun chal­lenge, and to oth­ers, a night­mare from which only insan­i­ty can be fair­ly expect­ed. (They made a whole movie about this!) Per­haps this is how we may iden­ti­fy the true devo­tees of the sev­enth art, those will­ing to for­sake every­thing else before their cel­lu­loid god. That, or they’re just not a peo­ple person.

Apply for the Iso­lat­ed Cin­e­ma here.