A fleeting passage to the orient, Ruth Beckermann, Austria, 1999, 82’

The filmmaker decides to trace the travels of Empress Elisabeth of Austria to the Orient, even though the results were uncertain. With great openness, she embarks on a journey, running the risk of perhaps discovering nothing at all: no clues to the real figure behind the fairytale princess, no answer to the question of how one deals with foreign countries as a privileged traveller. As the first-person narrrator, the filmmaker thinks about images: forbidden, official, falsified and genuine, incidentally including in her reflections the problem of the tourist’s view of things, which not even she can escape. (Stefan Grissemann)