Onlookers with filmmaker Kimi Takesue
Onlookers explores the paradox of travel: Why do people fly thousands of miles from home to lounge in a Laotian guest house sipping smoothies while watching re-runs of the TV show “Friends”? Why do we climb to the top of a colossal mountain just to snap selfies, rather than enjoy the extraordinary view? We are present, but absent. Looking, but not seeing.
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. Once the most heavily bombed country in the world during the Vietnam War, Laos is now a cheap destination for international travelers. The film tracks the intricate choreography of travel, and the power imbalances at play, as tourists and locals intermingle, vie for space, and move on parallel tracks without contact, oblivious to one another.
Compelling questions animate the film: What is the difference between a tourist and a traveler? Between participant and onlooker? Where does curiosity cross into intrusion? What activities give our lives meaning? How does a place become a commodity? Is sustainable, respectful cross-cultural travel possible? How much of tourist life involves waiting: arrivals and departures, boredom and cellphones? And why, finally, do we travel? What are we looking for?
At the heart of Onlookers is the quiet presence, the warmth, and the curiosity of filmmaker Kimi Takesue. She, too, is an onlooker, tourist, and photographer-looking at people looking—and documenting in formal tableaux the experience of travel with its fluctuating moments of uncertainty, intrusiveness, exhilaration, fatigue, disappointment, absurdity, and surprise.
As the journey wears on and the tourists begin to tire, we finally see Laotians engage in their own recreation and fun: children chase each other in a bouncy castle at a carnival, old men play a game of bocce at dusk, a crowd gathers to cheer on its favorite team at the boat race. In the end, we are all looking for ways to escape, to play, and to feel alive together.
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue will join for a conversation after the film with Inney Prakash, film curator and critic and founder of Prismatic Ground.
Free admission! Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.
About the Speakers
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. In 2018 she received a highly-competitive national “Breakthrough Award” and fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures for her contributions to the documentary field. Other honors include a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, two artist fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), a Kodak Cinematography Fellowship, a CAAM Fellowship (Center for Asian American Media), and grants from Catapult, ITVS, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), and The Arts Council of England. She is eleven-time artist fellow at Yaddo, Marblehouse, Wexner Center for the Arts, Bogliasco, and MacDowell.
Takesue’s films have screened at more than 250 film festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, Toronto, New Directors/ New Films (MoMA & Lincoln Center), SXSW, Mar del Plata, Centre Pompidou, London’s ICA, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and have aired on PBS, IFC, Comcast, and the Sundance Channel. Takesue has served as a selection committee member for MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight as well as a nominator for the Rockefeller Media Arts Award. She has also served as a panelist for the New York Foundation for the Arts and and international juror at the 2017 BAFICI-Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (Argentina). Her films have circulated widely in educational settings and are used regularly in colleges and universities in various courses including Cultural Studies, Asian-American Studies, Cinema Studies, Women’s Studies, and Film production courses.
Inney Prakash is a film curator and critic based in New York City and the founder and director of Prismatic Ground, an annual festival dedicated to avant-garde media. His previous roles include Co-Director of Programming at Maysles Documentary Center and Curatorial Lead for the San Diego Asian Film Festival He presently serves as Curator of Film at the Asia Society Museum. Prakash has also contributed to festivals like Sundance and SXSW. His writings have appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Comment, and several other platforms, reflecting his deep engagement with the film community.