Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival Introduces Lie Detector 

Sweden’s Göteborg Film Festival, the biggest film-TV event in the Nordic countries, is introducing  a lie detector test, to point up the event’s central 2026 debating point: Truth.

Inside an interrogation room built for the occasion, members of the public will undergo a polygraph examination conducted by a real-life specialist, Ørjan Hesjedal, the festival announced Monday. 

The “high-pressure scenario inspired by investigative environments – complete with cameras, lighting and physiological monitoring” – is voluntary, though likely to prove very popular. 

It’s also in the vein of other live-event simulations which are weirdly of the moment and turn on high human-stake issues. Most memorably, in 2021, as the pandemic still raged in parts of the world, Swedish emergency nurse Lisa Enroth was selected from thousands of applicants to spend seven days at the Pater Noster Lighthouse, now a luxury boutique hotel on the isolated island of Hamneskär, off the coast of western Sweden. She had no computer nor mobile but the ability to binge 60 films from the Göteborg Festival’s program. 

That initiative reflected on social distancing and the increasingly sole experience of film and TV consumption. The lie detector test will launch as the Festival asks what it calls a “simple but radical question: What is truth worth today?”

In a real life departure, cynics would say, truth is rewarded in the tests. Audience members who tell the truth and are found to do so will receive a Truth Ticket, granting access to a festival screening. 

“Truth has become strangely negotiable in our time. By turning truth into a currency, we assign it a tangible value that is rarely emphasised. We want to create an experiment where lying has consequences,” said Göteborg Artistic Director Pia Lundberg.“By turning truth into something you can earn – and spend – the festival assigns it a tangible value rarely acknowledged in the real world. In a time when personal narratives often overshadow factual truth, Truth Tickets reframes honesty as something with substance, consequence and worth,” the festival added Monday.

In another stunt, the Festival released on Monday a YouTube black comedy clip in which Alexander Karim (“The Swarm”) plays a lollipop-licking interrogator who reflects in a grimy torturer’s basement on how to measure truth. As his assistant, another Swedish star, David Dencik (“Pressure Point”), demonstrates on himself with a slightly deranged over-readiness two torture techniques. 

As another part of its Truth Focus, the Göteborg Festival will screen a showcase of films exploring the issue. These include Kaouther Ben Hania’s high-profile Oscar-shortlisted docudrama “The Voice of Hind Rajab,”; political spin satire “No Comment,” from Norway’s Petter Næss; Kirill Serebrennikov’s Cannes Premiere title “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” and Jim Sheridan and David Merriman “Re-Creation,” hailed by Variety as a “terrific” juror room drama, reviving the spirit of Sidney Lumet’s 1957 classic “12 Angry Men.”    

The 49th edition of the Göteborg Film Festival runs Jan. 23 to Feb. 1.