The Hospitable Gaze

The Hospitable Gaze is an ethnographic film that distils two decades of research in Crete’s region of Sfakia, celebrated for its rugged traditionalism, while stereotyped for its fierce illegality. By making photography a central arena, the film delves into the social imaginary concerning Others—tourists, and locals, hosts and guests, perpetrators and victims, ethnographer and his interlocutors—while examining the power of photographs to reconstruct the past and to illuminate the ethnographic encounter.

The film unpacks notions of locality, enmity, and otherness, particularly in relation to tourism, memories of the German occupation, and concepts of tradition and hospitality. The film engages hospitality and visual culture as domains of play, where roles and experiences are constantly recast. The Hospitable Gaze is also a film about the affordances, ambiguities and the affect of long-term ethnography whose temporality is imprinted on the texture of the film itself through the varied video footage.