Stop Nineteen

There have been long and short documentaries about troubling tourism before - notably The Holocaust Tourist and KZ, which put the focus on sites associated with the Nazi death camps. Director Danielle Swindells considers the subject from the perspective of Belfast and the legacy of The Troubles.

The official tourist bus tour we hear at the start of her short - which is showing as part of this year's Doc/Fest - may not consider the "peace walls" that separate neighbourhoods in the city a stopping off point, but Swindells shows us that hasn't stopped tourists flocking to snap selfies by them.

Archive film brings home the horrors of the conflict, before well-edited footage of the smiling and selfie sticks is overlaid with testimony from those who lived through The Troubles. "They're really feeding on something that was really bad for us," says one interviewee, bringing home the fact that one person's tourism may be adding to  another person's trauma. Shots of parts of the walls also show a disregard for history - someone has written, "Get over it", while someone else has added, "Ditto" beneath it. Swindells confronts us with the lived experience of those in Belfast who feel as though tourism has put them in a fishbowl.

This to-the-point and well-structured film only lasts eight minutes - but you'll be thinking about it for a lot longer than that.