Dirty Pictures

Palestine, April 15th-16th 2007

Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Dirty Pictures is the seventh episode in the Hotel Diaries series, a collection of video recordings made in the world's hotel rooms, which relate personal experiences and reflections to contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.

"...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. Brilliantly, he manages to trim down the monstrosity of history to human proportions." 

— International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2007)

This title is also available on Hotel Diaries: John Smith.