Dirty Pictures (Hotel Diaries 7)

In the brilliant opening scene, we see filmmaker John Smith in a hotel room in the Palestinian Bethlehem Inn. He tensely waits while he keeps his camera running. The hotel has been renovated after the Israeli army abandoned it, but history refuses to be erased. The ceiling offers resistance. It requires John Smith's keen eye and wry British comment to reveal this. Unassuming and seemingly entirely improvised, he films the hotel room he stays in and provides his personal, politically slanted comments. Only after an extensive monologue, he expresses his thoughts about the restless ceiling. The second part of the film is set on the other side, in a hotel room in East Jerusalem, where Smith continues his account on his experiences regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Brilliantly, he manages to trim down the monstrosity of history to human proportions. Dirty Pictures is the seventh film in the Hotel Diaries series.