An experimental documentary. A psychological study of “home movies” filmed while on vacation along the Adriatic between 1954 and 1968. These films are relevant for four reasons: 1) their sociological and ethnological importance: the document as a metaphor for society, the first vacations abroad, the organization of free time. 2) Their collective intellectual importance: the memory of the same beaches in the same films. 3) Their historic importance: cinema as a personal medium for the masses. 4) Their artistic importance: filming as a family ritual, staged for the camera. The filmic material was analyzed and divided in sequence and then edited into a different order (descriptions, reactions, etc.). Removed from their private isolation to build a new whole, these scenes show various domestic situations shared by all, and other activities induced just as much by the cinematic means as by the social context. Private screening of individual situations becomes the document of common situations. Adria constitutes an artistic and scientific analysis of the cinematic means, and must be considered as a school for the gaze.