Göteborg Festival's 2027 Focus Asks How to Stay Young Forever
Göteborg Film Festival has built its 2027 Focus strand around one of humanity's oldest wishes: never growing old. The strand, called Focus: Forever Young, looks at the fascination with youth and the dream of immortality, according to Variety.
A Focus strand is a themed section of the programme that gathers films around one idea. The 2027 edition runs from 20 January to 6 February and marks the festival's 50th anniversary. Pia Lundberg is the festival's artistic director.
Three films have been named for the strand. Joshua Oppenheimer's The Revolution Against Death is a 23-minute short set at the annual Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival, a conference on longevity, the science of living longer. The New York Times' Op-Docs platform acquired the short, and Mubi will release it alongside Op-Docs in December.
Maria Martínez Bayona's The End of It is the debut feature of the Catalan filmmaker. It premiered in the Premiere section at the Cannes Film Festival. Rebecca Hall, Gael García Bernal and Beanie Feldstein star in a story set in a world where death is a choice for the rich.
The third title is Once Upon a Time in Harlem, directed by William Greaves and David Greaves. It imagines figures of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of Black arts and writing in New York, gathering at a cocktail party in Duke Ellington's townhouse in 1970.
The strand arrives after a different theme. Göteborg's 2026 Focus strand centred on truth and introduced a lie detector event. Each year, the strand gives the festival a way to pull its programme into one conversation.
There is also a staffing change behind the scenes. Josef Kullengård has been the festival's Head of Industry since 2022, and he will join CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen documentary festival, as its new head of Industry & Training, Variety reports. The industry side of Göteborg runs the meetings and markets where filmmakers, sales agents and buyers do business, so the role matters to the festival's dealmaking as well as its public screenings.
For a general audience, a festival like Göteborg is one of the places where films first meet the people who will decide where they go next. A theme such as youth and immortality gives those visitors a way into a crowded programme. The festival's own industry page lists the next industry dates, and its schedule will show how the strand fits around them.
