Drive-thru

"The Sami people are the indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia (often known as Lap, Lapp, or Laplanders). They have been historically portrayed in photography as exotic tourist attractions or mere ethnography documentation.

I met the Samis for the first time in 1999, and years later I spent two summers working as a guide in North Cape, Norway – a place that is both a tourist destination and a grazing land for reindeers. This experience allowed me to observe how Samis and tourism coexisted in the same territory. I got fascinated by how tourists behaved as a group, and how their patterns got repeated everyday, although unique individuals performed them.

Being born in Costa Rica but living and working in Norway has definitively marked my artistic production. The fact that I don't belong here has also allowed me to address issues, with Drive-thru, that would probably be politically incorrect for a white ethnic Norwegian or for an ethnic Sami.

According to the photography historian Michael Frizot, every traveler with a camera becomes an ethnologist. With Drive-thru, I wanted to get the roles inverted, and instead of taking pictures of the Sami I turned my cameras towards the tourists. What the audience sees most of the time is Nils' back [the film’s main character], and how the landscape becomes a scene. We all have been in the same situation that the film presents, either in front of or behind the camera.

Nils' picture can be found in thousands of photo albums around the whole world, and, once he retires, Nils assures, he will travel the world taking pictures of every local he meets.  In any case, the film is less about Nils and more about being observed and looking at the observers; while, at the same time, it is a humor-filled anthropological study on the contemporary tourism industry and traveling in the 21st century.

In 2009, when the film was shot, most of the consumer video cameras were of the same quality, which is the HDV format. I wanted the film to stand as a record of how travellers documented their journeys at that time and this is why the film was intentionally not made in HD. Besides, the film, that was shot in the 16:9 format, visually owes a lot to landscape painting."

Christian Bermudez in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)