Where Are You Taking Me? with filmmaker Kimi Takesue
2025 Carol B. Epstein Visiting Artist in the Department of Performing and Media Arts
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?
Employing a strikingly visual, observational style, Takesue travels through the vibrant streets of Kampala to the rural quiet of Hope North, a refuge and school for survivors of civil war. The film offers multi-faceted portraits of Ugandans and their country, exploring the the complex interplay between the observer and the observed. This cinematic journey interrogates the perspective of a cultural outsider and challenges notions of the familiar and the “exotic”. Where are we going...and what will we find?
Structured in a series of stylized observational vignettes, Where Are You Taking Me? captures the rhythms of everyday life in Uganda. By focusing on the commonplace, the film counters stereotypical images of Uganda that emphasize the horrors of war, poverty, and victimization. Moving from one revealing encounter to the next, Where Are You Taking Me? recreates a heightened sensory experience of global travel and explores the touristic gaze and the challenges that arise in cross-cultural representation. Within the film, the question “where are you taking me?” moves beyond curiosity into a confrontation of the politics and ethics of the documentary contract.
Filmmaker Kimi Takesue will join for a conversation after the film with Natasha Raheja, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Cornell.
Free admission! Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.
“Beautiful, fascinating… Some scenes appear as artfully composed as a painting (and some reminiscent of famed painters). But they are found moments, and they have movement and character as well as poetry…the film is an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.” - David DeWitt, The New York Times
“Where Are You Taking Me is an uplifting observational documentary that plays on seeing and being seen…Takesue's beautifully meditative work is aware of its outsider status… Lovely transitions, via image and sound, and striking compositions make the pic an enriching experience - Jay Weissberg, Variety
“[The] extraordinary postwar Uganda dream flight of Kimi Takesue’s Where Are You Taking Me?, which begins by dropping us in medias res at a bustling curbside in Kampala before tunneling through bubbly weddings, soul-thrumming drum circles, a girls’ weightlifting tournament, and more. Takesue’s askew angles, sealed-off compositions, and embrace of return glances foster the strange beauty, humor, and disorientation so rare in the global glut of hard-drive-dump docs.” -Nicolas Rapold, The Village Voice
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.
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.
Natasha Raheja is a political and visual anthropologist working in the areas of migration, borders, state power, aesthetics, and ethnographic film. Her current research generates medium-specific insights across writing and film to advance political theory on majority-minority relations and majoritarianism. Currently in production, her documentary film, Kitne Passports? (How many Passports?), features cross-caste, Pakistani Hindu migrant families in India, visualizing their everyday identifications and disidentifications as they shift between minority and majority status. The film is a second project that emerges from first project and forthcoming book, Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India, an ethnographic account of Pakistani Hindu migration to India that theorizes the flexibility of the religious minority form across state borders in South Asia. Raheja currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell and directs the Nazaara Media Lab, a political and visual anthropology lab at Cornell University focusing on aesthetics, spectacle, ethnographic film, documentary, borders, migration, state power, and beyond.
Part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of New Day Films.