Tourist Go Home
1959 · 24m · Canada
Directed by Stanley Jackson, Ronald Weyman
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
This humorous short offers a tongue-in-cheek lesson for Canada's tourist industry on public relations, showing exactly how not to treat visitors.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1959 industrial satire about tourist hospitality should be a snooze, but Jackson and Weyman actually weaponize the bland earnestness of the form itself—the instructional short becomes the joke, which is almost too clever for its own good.
This sits beautifully in the lineage of Canadian NFB institutional satire, where formal restraint and deadpan execution become the vehicle for critique; the craftsmanship lies in letting the absurdity breathe within the bounds of the how-to film convention.
The real lift here is tonal—the directors commit completely to the instructional register while systematically demolishing every piece of advice, trusting that constraint to carry the comedy instead of underlining it with a wink.