Where Are You Taking Me? with filmmaker Kimi Takesue

A group of children and one adult are gathered outdoors, wearing light-colored clothing, with trees and a blue sky in the background. They appear to be posing closely together for a photo.

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 Jeffrey Palmer, Associate Professor in the Department of Performing & Media Arts.

Free admission! Sponsored by the Minority, Indigenous & Third World Studies Committee and the Department of Performing & Media Arts.

Part of our "Doc Spots" series. Courtesy of New Day Films.

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. 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.