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Eliamani's Homestead is an unfiltered presentation of unequal power relations, othering, suspicions, misunderstandings, and the untranslated in an exchange between Indigenous hosts and their guests in a cultural tourism setting. A family of Dutch tourists visits a Maasai homestead in Tanzania, where Eliamani and her child have no food. The tourists take copious pictures of the women and children and haggle over the price of a bracelet—a common scene in cultural tourism encounters the world over. The discomforting exchange is all the more palpable when Eliamani breaks the fourth wall and reminds the filmmaker and viewer of their complicity. This film dialogue is part review, part conversation with the filmmaker who describes the process of making, editing, and screening the film, including audience and participants’ reactions. It situates Eliamani's Homestead within the ambit of ethnographic film, both illustrating visual ethnography's complicity in cultural tourism and revealing its potential to offer its own critique when it maintains a multivocal approach that strives for dialogue with “the other” on both sides of the camera.

'Eliamani's Homestead' was shot as a result of long-term anthropological research in Tanzania and the translations were created in close cooperation with the Maasai research participants. Originally recorded for research purposes for a project on the relationship between images of and interactions with ‘the other’, the 20-minute single-shot includes jerky camera movements, but was left uncut and without voiceover in order to give the viewer a real-time experience of 'being there'. Within anthropology, the documentary invites to reflect on parallels between anthropology and tourism, and spurs debates regarding reflexivity. It addresses elements of the 'observer paradox' through the almost complete invisibility of the researcher’s camera, which stands in stark contrast with the obtrusive tourist cameras. That is, until Eliamani looks straight into the lens and dismissively comments upon the researcher’s camera too, making researcher and the documentary’s public part of the voyeuristic 'problem' as well. Outside anthropology, it invokes debates about how we see and interact with 'the other' in (cultural) tourism as well as in wider contexts. It thus addresses the question whether and how audiovisual data segments could be used to share anthropological knowledge inside and outside the discipline and academia.