Onlookers with filmmaker Kimi Takesue
2025 Carol B. Epstein Visiting Artist in the Department of Performing and Media Arts
Named by The New York Times as one of the Best Documentaries of 2024, Onlookers explores the paradox of travel: Why do people fly thousands of miles from home to lounge in a Lao 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 Lao people 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.
“I also loved Kimi Takesue’s unusual film about tourism in Laos…What you slowly realize you’re watching is the way that constant observation creates a certain sort of performance as well as disruption. Tourists are there to look at locals, and locals look right back at them, watching their behavior as well. But there’s an extra layer, because here we are as viewers, watching people be watched. So who is the real onlooker?”- Alissa Wilkinson, The New York Times
"Immersive, beguiling, and productively unsettling...Takesue acknowledges the voyeurism inherent to being human, while also acknowledging its ethical consequences — whether we are physically traveling to foreign locales or sitting in a cinema...the film is an exercise in the power of watching and listening." - Ellen G’Sell, Hyperallergic
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, 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.
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.