Concerned Travelers (2017)
Concerned Travelers is set on Lesbos during the last weeks before the EU-Turkey agreement came into effect in early 2016. One Million people reached Europe by sea in 2015 and almost half of them arrived on the beaches of Lesbos. The film follows migrants who arrive on Lesbos, before they move with a ferry to the Greek mainland and continue to travel north to central Europe. With the influx of migrants on the Greek Island, tourism came to a sudden halt and changed the livelihood of many islanders profoundly. Tourists who discuss their concerns in online travel forums regarding the crisis create the tone for this short documentary narrated by an omniscient observer. Concerned Travelers is shot in non-interventional, observational direct cinema style.
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Reviews
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.