Dark Tourism: Holidays In the Sun (Manfred Becker, 2008)
Good luck trying to find this one. Whenever I google it I just get references to the screening I saw and one other festival. Which is a shame, because it’s totally riveting. Becker’s film documents one of the most ghoulish predilections of our age, dropping into the newly minted tourist hotspots of genocide sites in Latvia, Cambodia, Lithuania, Poland, Sarajevo and Vietnam and offering little in the way of contextualization beyond the thoughts of those who are visiting or working there. The result is one of the most uncomfortable meta-documentaries I’ve ever seen that gets right to the heart of our desire to experience death and destruction at a comfortable distance, and poses numerous questions about how we decide not only what is worth remembering, but how. By the end, as the sound fades on a list of further atrocity sites that could be potential day-trips where we can safely “meet confusion” before returning to the numbing safety of adventureless lives, I was absolutely reflecting on my own choice to be indulge in emotional tourism as a viewer, and as a visitor to these sites (I’ve been to the killing fields in Cambodia). I really hope this film gets more exposure soon – would love to talk about it with people.
Dark Tourism: Holidays In The Sun
