Tourist – The experience
- NOVAK Productions (BE)
- PICTANOVO (FR)
- WALLIMAGE (BE)
- English
- Aide Financière Sélective (AFS)
Malène Rydahl, Carl Honoré, Elisabeth Grimaud, Serge Marquis, Saskia Cousin, Alain Decrop, Rodolphe Christin, Olivier Archambeau, Mathieu Labonne, Jean-François Staszak
Prodcution of audiovisual modules: Frédéric Fischer
Director’s assistant: Olivia Rolin
Research assistant: Paula Onet
Editing: Frédéric Fischer and Nicolas Blies
TOURIST THERAPY is an international transmedia documentary project that reveals the market-based orchestration, the staging of your own holidays by the biggest industry in the world: the tourism industry. This ‘touristified’ world is now reduced to a mere set, an enchanted space based on the imagination, somewhere between supply and demand. TOURIST THERAPY invites you to discover the other side of this set.
Touristic enchantment falsifies our perception of reality and leaves us in an uncontroversial, ideal world, far from the issues and challenges of our society. The concept of touristic enchantment refers to a market of fools, but a market of willing fools.
On the one hand, tourists must ignore what goes on behind the scenes (which they naturally want to do), in particular the other, the manager of tourism products must create the illusion of a perfect paradise without ever allowing the customer to see what is really going on. This illusion is the intellectual basis of our argument.
In this amazing staging, we all take the same photos, we all visit the same places, we all read the same guides, meet the same people and take the same routes. Everything is scripted, everything is formatted. Nothing is left to chance. We travel with supervised freedom. Why do we feel different when actually we’re cloning ourselves ad infinitum? Can we really distinguish between the staging we are being sold and reality? How to make a change?