Home Away at Home: Mediating Spaces of Tourism and Narratives of Belonging in the German Village of South Korea

Abstract

Current research of film tourism has been garnering interest, but still mainly premises managerial perspectives on destination management, lacking more holistic approaches to critical implications of film tourism. It becomes pertinent to explore film tourism in terms of tourist experiences comprising the reliving and reconstitution of fictional events (not always) based on media narratives. This paper considers how tourism ‘takes place’ in media (as content) and touring uses film (as process) as inherent parts of spatial, liminal and mediated experience. It centres on the German village in Namhae, South Korea, which was built over a decade ago as a tribute to the Korean workers who lived in Germany as Gastarbeiter. It explores the question of identities of the ‘locals’ as portrayed in the film, ‘Endstation der Sehnsüchte’ by Cho Sunghyung and juxtaposes this alongside the huge influx of ‘tourists’ indulging in photographing experience on the film set of the Korean TV drama ‘Couple or Trouble’. What surfaces in this research is a complex mediation of experiences that explore the nexus between the impacts of film and television on the cultural heritage of residents in film tourism locations and the convergence of mediatisation, globalisation and identity through film.