Director's statement:
For the past ten years, I have lived and worked between Colombia and Germany. Moving between these two worlds has made me increasingly aware of the invisible assumptions that shape the encounter between Western Europe and Latin America—not through overt prejudice, but through the quiet ways privilege comes to feel like normality for those who possess it.. TOURISTEN grew out of my desire to explore these hidden dynamics through an intimate story where emotional conflict gradually reveals broader social realities. I am interested in how our most private emotions—love, desire, jealousy, fear—can unconsciously reproduce larger systems of inequality, particularly through tourism, where postcolonial dynamics continue to shape the way we look at—and move through—the world.
Surrounded by Bogotá's steep mountains, its relentless daytime chaos, and the unsettling silence of its nights, the film follows Maja and Alexis, a German couple in their mid-thirties whose open relationship has reached a turning point. As they begin to feel the weight of time, Maja clings to spontaneity while Alexis seeks stability, becoming increasingly jealous and controlling. During a night out in Bogotá—a city they experience not as a home but as a playground for escape—a lost wallet, immediately assumed to have been stolen by a local, pulls them into the unfamiliar streets where their emotional crisis collides with social realities they neither understand nor can control.
What begins as a relationship drama full of unspoken tension, gradually transforms into a neo-noir, where the usual cinematic gaze is reversed: instead of observing Latin America through European eyes, the film observes Europeans from the perspective of a country that is increasingly defined as a tourist destination, and yet still too often reduced to the fantasies and expectations of its visitors.
I belong to a generation raised on promises of freedom, mobility, and limitless possibility. Yet these ideals often conceal a paradox: our pursuit of pleasure can make us blind to the realities that sustain it. Tourism embodies this contradiction: it promises discovery while allowing us to remain detached from the places we consume. In TOURISTEN, the protagonists' seemingly trivial concerns—jealousy, hedonism, and the search for excitement—collide with a city where insecurity, migration, and violence are woven into everyday life. The distance between these worlds gradually becomes impossible to ignore.
Ultimately, TOURISTEN traces a couple's descent into jealousy, manipulation, and violence while asking how easily asymmetrical power relations become invisible to those who benefit from them.
