The French film company Pathé produced the travel scene to the left on a trip to Gotland in May 1914. Pathé had a local office in Stockholm and had sent out one of its cinematographers on the trip. They left on a ferry from Nynäshamn and on arrival recorded the attractions of Visby, the ancient wall ruins of the medieval town, churches, the harbour and the marketplace.

This film is, in fact, quite representative for the way Sweden was documented on film during the first decades of the 20th century. In the database "Reel History" several films of several places in Sweden are to be found. In fact, one of the best ways to use the database, is to search for geographical names of places. The demand for film, and desire for experiencing foreign places in moving pictures was a kind of pretence to tourism. This may very well have been one of the reasons that the geographical film genre was popular for so long. The expedition films of the 1920s are for example a later variety of this geographical genre.

In fact, discussions about distances growing smaller in the film medium and the imaginary travel in pictures, were quite common in the printed press before World War One. It often served as a commercially useful strategy in film programmes and ads. This was particularly true for geographical films. For instance, the film Ett besök i Stockholm [A visit to Stockholm] from 1909, encourage anybody who had not yet been to the Swedish capital, "to take a cheap trip there, and to those who have already been there, to brush up their memories by revisiting the most frequently visited sites."