Zeitgeist Films | The Inner Tour
Ra'anan Alexandrowicz
Film Info
2001
94 mins
Color
Israel
In Arabic and Hebrew
with English subtitles
Beta SP
Synopsis

From the director of JAMES' JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM, THE INNER TOUR tells the story of a group of tourists on a visit to their homeland. Filmed in 2000, just months before the current Middle East clashes erupted, it recounts the adventures of a group of West Bank Palestinians taking a three-day sightseeing tour of Israel. A simple human tale of a weekend jaunt across the border that becomes an unfinished journey traversing time and crisscrossing between the emotional recollections of a vanished past and the harsh realities of the present day. The heroes of this film are the tourists themselves, most of whom have never been to Israel before, while those who had, did so under less-than-positive circumstances. As they make their way across the country, the landscape seems familiar but foreign, threatening but thrilling. The emotional turmoil is reflected in their very eyes.

This is their homeland, but they are visiting it as tourists. This is the state that has occupied them for decades, but it is also a country, just like any other, with people not very different from them. Their observations of and encounters with the country they are visiting, and their interactions, both between themselves and within themselves, lie at the heart of this film, which paints a unique and complex portrait of one of the world’s most tangled national conflicts.