DC/DOX: “The Siege of Paradise” Asks What Kind of Tourist We Should Be
Everyone has their own definition of paradise, but there are a few places that we can all agree are the closest we’ll get to heaven on earth. Do we feel this way because beauty is universal? Or is it because these destinations find their way to social media and the onslaught of articles informing the reader that this place is the next big travel locale? Gar O’Rourke’s documentary, The Siege of Paradise, premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival, then screened at the DC/DOX Film Festival. It’s a film that asks the viewer what kind of tourist they want to be.
Cinque Terre sits on Italy’s northern Riviera. It’s a seaside town made up of five villages, all of which still cling to an old way of life…to a certain extent. The years of being fishing and vineyard villages are behind them as tourism becomes a main aspect of their economy. Year-round, somewhere between 4,000 and 4,500 people reside there, but during the summer months, the population balloons. Cinque Terre welcomes 3.5 million tourists annually. As one might imagine, this influx of people has pros and cons for those who live there. The Siege of Paradise weaves together the stories of locals and an influencer tourist as they intermingle during the summer season.
Cinque Terre is not accessible by car, so visitors arrive via train or ferry. The Siege of Paradise treats these modes of transportation as harbingers of doom for the sleepy little seaside town. The boats are particularly looming as they float off the coastline, filled with tourists ready to experience what Cinque Terre has to offer.
© Venom Films, Dynamic Frame
Therein lies the rub. People are going to Cinque Terre because they want to experience the culture of the seaside villages, but the more tourists who visit, the more the towns have to shift to meet the needs of the travelers. By doing so, they’re losing the very reason people wanted to see the towns in the first place. Even so, watching the tourists go about their business in the documentary is a head-scratching experience. In a sense, these people could be anywhere. So few of them are meaningfully interacting with the culture of Cinque Terre. They’re just there to recreate the pictures they saw on Instagram that brought them here in the first place.
The Siege of Paradise doesn’t seek to judge the people it focuses its camera on. Whether that be the locals or the tourists, The Siege of Paradise just lets the camera linger. We hear two older guys complaining that their streets are overrun with people, counting the days until they leave, then in the next sentence talking about how at least they get to look at attractive women all day. Similarly, the American influencer is presented without judgment, but some of her sequences showcase a real issue with the way people travel. She spends so much time looking at her phone, carefully cultivating the memories she can publish to her followers, that she isn’t present for these moments to truly register in her brain. A prolonged sequence where she’s on the beach, taking selfies as she’s waiting for her friend to return, is presented in silence. It’s an unsettling quiet that’s hard to shake.
O’Rourke’s The Siege of Paradise captures a location on the verge, but the precipice it finds itself on is yet to be determined. There’s another “undiscovered” vacation destination waiting to be found, and Cinque Terre could soon be left in the dust. Where does that leave the people who rely on tourism? Can Cinque Terre return to what it once was? The Siege of Paradise may only focus on Cinque Terre, but this is happening all over the world. The documentary is not only a carefully constructed critique of what it means to be a tourist, but also a deeply compelling character study of humans in the summertime.
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