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Jonas Holmberg will step down at Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival next year, after his 10th anniversary as artistic director of the leading Nordic fest.
Holmberg took over at Göteborg in 2014, succeeding Marit Kapla. In his decade at the helm, he helped the Swedish event become the first major A-list film festival to achieve full gender parity in its line up (in 2020) with an equal number of films directed by men and women. Over the years, Holmberg also become known for his headline-grabbing gimmicks, including such social experiments as “coffin cinema” in 2019 in which viewers were locked into a specially designed sarcophagus with a film projected onto the inside of the casket; a COVID-era event of extreme social distancing in 2021 in which a single film fan spent a week watching movies in a converted lighthouse on a rocky island off Sweden’s west coast; and last year’s experiment, in which a professional hypnotist performed mass hypnosis on gala audiences, only breaking the spell post-screening.
Along the way, Holmberg has also transformed Göteborg into a hybrid event, with a digital platform running alongside its in-person screenings and its own, stand-alone streaming service, Draken Film, now Sweden’s leading VOD platform for arthouse movies. The board of Göteborg Film Festival has begun the search for his replacement.
“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,” said Holmberg. “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.”
Göteborg is Scandinavia’s largest film festival, drawing an annual audience of some 270,000, with around 2,000 industry attendees. The 47th Göteborg Film Festival runs from January 26 to February 4, 2024.
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