Film series: Seeing and Looking Across Cultures: The Films of Kimi Takesue
2025 Carol B. Epstein Visiting Artist in the Department of Performing and Media Arts
Cornell Cinema is delighted to welcome filmmaker Kimi Takesue to campus for a retrospective of her three award-winning feature documentary films and to reflect upon the compelling questions they raise about what it means to look — and more importantly, to see and thoughtfully engage — across cultures.
The program will feature:
Where Are You Taking Me? (2012)
Tuesday, February 24, 6pm
Cornell Cinema
A high society wedding, a movie set, a beauty salon, a women’s weightlifting competition: these are a few of the many places in Uganda visited in Kimi Takesue’s lyrical feature documentary, Where Are You Taking Me?
Professional Directions: 95 and 6 To Go (2016)
Wednesday, February 25, 5pm
Film Forum, Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts
In 95 and 6 To Go, a resilient widower’s memories become intertwined with the fictional screenplay his granddaughter is writing, revealing the fine line between life and art, rumination and imagination.
Onlookers (2023)
Thursday, February 26, 6pm
Cornell Cinema
With wit and a gentle eye for social critique, Onlookers observes Western backpackers and tour groups from East Asia descend upon Laos, a small socialist country in Southeast Asia economically dependent on international tourism.
Free admission! Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous, & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts
About the filmmaker
Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Film, the Rockefeller Fellowship in Media Arts, and the internationally competitive “Breakthrough Award” and fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures honoring women making significant contributions to the documentary field. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Kodak Cinematography Fellowship, and grants from ITVS, Catapult Film Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Arts Council of England and artist fellowships from Yaddo (5x), MacDowell (5x), Marblehouse, Wexner Center for the Arts and Bogliasco.
In 2026, Takesue will receive a full retrospective of her films on the illustrious Criterion Channel. In 2025, she enjoyed her first mid-career retrospective in Asia at the esteemed Asian Film Archive in Singapore. Her films have screened extensively at festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, New Directors/ New Films, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, Mar del Plata, SXSW, the Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and have aired on PBS, IFC, Comcast, and the Sundance Channel.
Takesue’s recent feature length documentary Onlookers (2023) was named by The New York Times as one of the “Best Documentaries of 2024” and enjoyed a theatrical run at Metrograph Cinema in New York City. The film had its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival where it received an Honorable Mention for Breakout Features. The film had its international premiere at Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and was acquired by the Bibliothèque publique d'information at the Centre Pompidou to be shown throughout the public library system in France.
Takesue has served as a selection committee member for MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight as well as a nominator for the MacArthur Fellowship and Rockefeller Media Arts Award. She has also served as a panelist for the New York Foundation for the Arts and a juror at DOC NYC and BAFICI-Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. Her films have circulated widely in educational settings and are screened regularly in colleges and universities.
Takesue’s films have received positive reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Nation, Variety, Film Comment, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal among others. She is Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.
