Five Travel Writers

Ayun Halliday is the sole staff member of the quarterly zine, The East Village Inky, and the author of four self-mocking autobiographies, including No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers' Lessons Learned Too Late and Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste. Her first children's book, Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo will be published in the spring of 2009. She lives in Brooklyn with the playwright, Greg Kotis, and their exceptionally well-documented young. You can visit her website here.

Halliday took a break from globetrotting and maternal duties to indulge her cinematic wanderlust.

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Underground

Belgrade

Emir Kusturica's surrealistic history of the former Yugoslavia cuts a wide Balkan swath, but what really sticks with me is the insanity of that opening scene, where a horse cart bearing two shit-faced, gun-toting ne'er-do-wells careens through the streets of Belgrade, trailed by a phalanx of hired gypsy musicians. It was so thrilling, I had this visceral desire for the same exact scene to happen to me! Actually, it almost did in the Hotel Putnik, in Novi Sad.
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Before Sunset

Paris

The premise of this saga is so gut-wrenchingly romantic, and the Parisian setting so universally potent, it's tempting to turn back the clock in order to get a crack at spending the rest of my life bedeviled by what-ifs and if-onlys. I've wandered those same streets on numerous occasions, but must admit that my own experiences have been comparatively staid, especially that time I went with my mom.
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Daughter from Danang

Danang

Midway through this emotional non-fiction rollercoaster, I relaxed my grip on my hankie long enough to think, "God, I miss Vietnam. I could really go for some of what they're eating…" And that, I guess is a central difference between a casual visitor like me and the subject of this film, taken from her mother as part of the Ford administration's Operation Babylift and raised as an "all-American" girl, only to…whoopsie-daisy, you know what? Rent it before blabbermouth here spoils it for you.
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Lost in Translation

Tokyo

The sensory pop overload of Tokyo's Shibuya and Shinjuku neighborhoods captured through a credibly jet lagged lens. My Tokyo-reared friend Reiko was far less impressed than I, possibly because she understood everything everyone was saying, even the wacky talk show host and the constantly bowing officials, on hand to make linguistically-challenged Western ding dongs like me go, "Oh yes, yes, that's Tokyo to a T!"
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The Edge of Heaven

Istanbul

Fatih Akin's exhilarating, punk romance Head-On got me all a-drool to visit Istanbul, but damned if he didn't manage to pump out another feature film before I could get it together to get my underfunded, overscheduled heiner anywhere near the Bosphorus. The German-language bookstores and hilly outdoor cafes of his latest have doubled my determination, especially since his take on Turkish prisons is far more reassuring than the widely disseminated Midnight Express version.