Touristic Intents is a feature documentary film that explores the connection between mass tourism and political ideology. The film is centered on a case study: the never-completed Nazi resort of Prora, on Germany’s Baltic Sea, which was built on a mammoth scale beginning in 1936 to house 20,000 vacationing working-class Germans. This 4-mile-long building was used in propaganda to forward a promise of leisure time for the masses and strengthen sympathies between the workers and the Nazi party. The film asks: Is there an obligation to remember a building’s dark past?
The film screening will be followed by a Q&A with Mat Rappaport, a filmmaker, scholar, and the Donald W. Klein Professor of the Practice in Film and Media Studies at Tufts University.