Just one person attends the world’s most exclusive film festival

But at Goteborg, the Nordic countries’ most important festival, organisers have made an unusual virtue of necessity. “So many people who have been home alone, unable to meet friends or family, have turned to cinema for company and comfort,” said artistic director, Jonas Holmberg. “We wanted to experiment with that, to isolate that feeling, and take it to the extreme. So we thought, ‘Why don’t we isolate the person on a small island with nothing but films?’”

As the only country in Europe to resist a formal lockdown, Sweden has followed its own path through the pandemic, neither recommending mask use nor shutting down schools until December, when a disproportionately high mortality rate from the disease forced it to change strategy.

But much of the country has complied with guidelines issued by the government, and after months of even voluntary social distancing and lockdowns, a wintry week alone on an island with only movies for company might seem the last thing most people would need. Yet when an evocative online video announced the contest, more than 12,000 people applied for the solo experience. On January 19, the festival selected Lisa Enroth, a 41-year-old emergency nurse from Skovde, in southern Sweden, as the winner.

Like healthcare workers everywhere, Enroth has found the past several months stressful. “Every day at the hospital we’ve been dealing with so much,” she said. “With all the patients, and all the new protocols, I’ve never felt so unisolated in my life.”

So when she saw the video’s call for applications, she didn’t hesitate. “Alone in nature, on an island? Plus movies? I was like, ‘Yes, I need this’.”

The hospital agreed to give Enroth time off (“My boss is a movie buff,” she explained) and on January 30, a boat brought her to Hamneskar, a rocky outcrop some 25 miles from Goteborg that was nicknamed Pater Noster by sailors who would recite the Lord’s Prayer as they neared its treacherous waters. There, she took up residence in the former keeper’s cottage that sits aside the island’s cast-iron lighthouse, and settled in for the movie marathon.

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During her time on Pater Noster, Enroth will have access to the 70 films screening at the festival, which include the Finnish Oscar contender Tove, Thomas Vinterberg’s acclaimed Another Round and Goteborg native Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, all of which are competing for best Nordic film. International films in competition include Emma Dante’s The Macaluso Sisters, set in Sicily, and Charlène Favier’s Slalom, about elite downhill skiers abused by their coach. There is also a separate section, called Social Distances, featuring films created in response to the pandemic, and one called Lockdown Cinema for short films made in quarantine.

Although she will post a daily video diary on a dedicated page of the festival website, Enroth has agreed to eschew all other forms of communication and entertainment — no phone, no books — during her time on Pater Noster. She said that she wasn’t worried about getting lonely, but didn’t rule out the possibility she may “start talking to the furniture.” And, like Holmberg, she was also interested to see how her week on the island changes the experience of watching films. “The first day, it’s just ‘Oh, I’m alone, watching a movie.’ But a few days in, I might be like, ‘OK, these people are my only company. What if I hate them?’” she said.

But for the self-professed science fiction fan (her favorite movie is “The Never Ending Story”), even that will be a welcome escape. “I love watching movies, because it makes me let go of work and everything else that’s going on right now,” Enroth said. “It’ll be great to be surrounded by someone else’s reality.”

The New York Times