Citizen Tourist
2023 · 3m
Genres: documentary, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
With global tourism on the rise, this short looks at the tourist as a species with exotic and particular quirks, turning the spotlight on an industry shaping entire cities and cultures in profound ways.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone flips the documentary gaze and asks *what* the tourist actually is—not sympathetically, not piously, but with the deadpan anthropological eye usually reserved for nature docs. The satire works because it refuses to wink; it just lets the specimen speak.
A formally elegant inversion of the essay-documentary tradition, situating itself squarely in the lineage of Errol Morris and contemporary essay films that weaponize observational distance. The tonal restraint—darkly comic but never snide—shows real discipline in the edit.
The decision to treat tourists as a behavioral species rather than moral subjects is the move that unlocks everything; it's a single conceptual choice that reframes three minutes into something that feels both inevitable and completely fresh.
Reviews
With global tourism on the rise, the short film 'CITIZEN TOURIST' tries to look at the tourist as a species with exotic and particular quirks, inviting us to look at ourselves and our group behaviours when we fill that role.