Preceded by short: Desert Veils (Louise Lebeau, Canada, 1993). On an archaeological dig in Mexico, a filmmaker tries to abandon the dead for the living, but finds her cinematic status prevents her from doing so. (14 mins, Color, 16mm, From Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre) The mantle of the professional traveler is thought to provide a waiver from the superficial pleasures of the tourist. Director Robb Moss worked as a free-lance cameraman traveling the world over. He enjoyed the privilege of finding himself in unlikely locales, filming initiation rites in West Africa one week, Soviet scientists on holiday in Hungary the next. But beneath the exotic aspects of his profession lay a constant doubt, "the lurking knowledge that I often had no idea what I was really filming." Compounding this insecurity was a domestic problem: he and his wife could not conceive a child. This personal dilemma influenced his travels. At home, he felt rootless; abroad, he felt estranged amid a culture of families. "Like a tourist," he says, "my world was defined by 'taking': I took film jobs (where I took pictures), so we could take vacations, to escape the fact we were taking fertility drugs." Light-hearted and loquacious, The Tourist is an intriguing meditation about consumption and conception as the two poles of the globe.-Steve Seid