Social Landscapes

Jonas Meier / Switzerland / 2026 / International Premiere / 78 min

The beach looks like something out of a lottery advertisement, but it’s still not good enough. As one user puts it on TripAdvisor: The beach was beautiful, but there was too much sand. ‘Social Landscapes’ confronts us with an algorithm-driven world where mass tourism has triumphed. And then it confronts the tourist in all of us – and it does so with merciless humour and a simple, punchy concept.

With deliriously beautiful images from countries such as India, Mexico, Egypt, USA and South Korea, it is an adventurous journey around the world, not in 80 days, but in just under 80 minutes. But with comments and ‘reviews’ from TripAdvisor as a kind of collective voice-over, the images and sound contrast sharply with each other. Today, it is common to see an abundance of videos and images from distant places before you have taken a single step there. Social media shapes our perception of places before we visit them. But what does that mean for how we perceive the world, ourselves, and, not least, each other?