Thursday, November 30, 6:00 p.m. | Rappaport’s absorbing documentary poses a question: can a building be guilty? Centered on the never-completed Nazi resort of Prora, a 4-mile-long building made to house 20,000 vacationing working-class Germans, and used as a promise of leisure time for the masses and to strengthen sympathies for Nazi party. After decades of abandonment, the massive edifice is now being redeveloped into apartments, condominiums, hotels, and a youth hostel. TOURISTIC INTENTS grapples with notions of place and identity in an era when the role of national monuments has become a defining issue of cultural memory. The resort of Prora stands as a lasting reminder of how buildings become vehicles for political ideology and myth-making throughout their lives. Is there an obligation to remember a building’s dark past? Director Mat Rappaport; Jonathan Mekinda, Architecture and Design Historian at the University of Illinois Chicago; and Sara Hall, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies and chair of the Minor in Moving Image Arts at the University of Illinois Chicago, in attendance Thursday, November 30.

Sponsors & Partners

Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center
The Goethe Institute
Chicago Architecture Biennial

The Film Center is ADA accessible. This presentation will be projected without open captions. The theater is hearing-loop equipped. For accessibility requests, please email filmcenter@saic.edu