Kimi Takesue

Onlookers (2023)

A film by Kimi Takesue
72 minutes / 2023
Film Website
Press Kit

Winner: Honorable Mention - Breakouts Features, Slamdance FIlm Festival

World Premiere: Slamdance Film Festival, USA

International Premiere: Cinema du Réel - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Asian Premiere: DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Korea

SYNOPSIS

ONLOOKERS offers a visually striking, immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country's dusty roads and tranquil rivers, we watch as elaborate painterly tableaus unfold, revealing the whimsical and at times disruptive interweaving of locals and foreigners in rest and play. Drawn to spectacle, tourists swarm to magnificent Buddhist temples, the ordered rituals of monks, and sites of dazzling natural beauty, then recede like a passing tide, leaving Laotians to continue with their daily lives.

ONLOOKERS transports viewers on a sensorial journey of deep looking and listening, inviting audiences to reflect on their own modes of tourism, while asking the looming existential questions: Why do we travel? What do we seek?

SELECTED PRESS

“The Best Documentaries of 2024, So Far” - ONLOOKERS one of 3 films picked by the NYTimes.

“I also loved “Onlookers,” 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

"Mesmerizes...A cross between a travelogue and a tone poem, director Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers takes the viewer on a journey through Laos, her camera capturing evocative images of a country that sits comfortably betwixt tradition and modernity... It’s people-watching, but with a twist: they could just as easily swap places with us, extending the conceit and turning our mundane lives into spectacle, too. Reality is endlessly cinematic."

-Christopher Llewellyn Reed, FILM FESTIVAL TODAY

"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

“A wry and at times uproarious ethnographic work…revelatory!”

-Michael Sicinski, FILM COMMENT

“Visually-stunning! ....showcases how tourism can have an effect on a country and its local people.”

-Charles Barfield, THE PLAYLIST

“Compelling! ...Through a series of consistent wide shots, the camera never moving, to a sound tableau that picks up the most subtle touristic rustling…Onlookers not only grabs your gaze almost subconsciously, but it also elicits nostalgia and self-reflection of one's own such experiences.” -Steve Rickinson, MODERN TIMES REVIEW

"Onlookers is the pithy result of her [Takesue’s} long look at a place and its tourism from untrodden angles. She is able to look at travel critically as well as see its potential."

-A.E Hunt, FILMMAKER MAGAZINE

"If you’re looking for a new kind of travel film, this is for you."

-Benjamin Franz, FILM THREAT

"Stunning visuals exploring what we see and what we know, what we are present for and what we are absent for."

-Mark Rifkin, THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK

"Who are these "onlookers" if not at the same time them, her and us, filmmaker and spectators, villagers and travellers? ...Faced with the ravages of tourism and the persistent colonial mentalities, it is easy to forget this register where the gaze suspends prejudices and establishes a level of equivalences; a group-based approach able to question the way in which roles are constructed, and where the work of filmmaking merges with the exercise of hospitality."     

-Antoine Thirion, CINEMA DU REEL, Centre Pompidou

"Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers, despite its placid veneer and languid pace amid the sightseeing landmarks of Laos, is loaded with the tension borne of ocular entanglement between subjects in their daily environments, tourists ogling per their mandate, Takesue’s own camera and subject position as traveler, and our apparently fixed positionality as witnesses to the scenes she captures. The result is as complex and open ended as the social co-existence it reveals. Through a series of expertly framed static takes (and meticulous sound design), we’re free to let our senses wander between the sometimes humorous, sometimes off putting, and always porous borders between seen and seer—and might just take pause to consider who could be observing us as we do."

-Inney Prakash, PRISMATIC GROUND, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)

“A gentle meditation on the nature of “travel” and the disruptive qualities of “tourism”, Takesue’s elegantly lensed images seem to argue for a more active reflection on the world and our place within it rather than remaining a perpetual onlooker observing without thought or feeling."

-Hayley Scanlon, WINDOWS ON WORLDS

"Both for its strong connection between the visuals and the sound, and the non-judgmental observation of mass tourism, Takesue’s documentary approach is comparable to Sergei Loznitsa’s “Austerlitz” (2016) shot in the concentration camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen. “Onlookers” comes up to its name in the appropriate empirical meaning: it is not interventional, not pro- or against what is going on in front of the lens. Visually strong, with the narrative completely built on moving images, and without as much as one single spoken or written comment, “Onlookers” motivates the viewers to ask themselves a question: why do we travel the way we do, with eyes wide shut?"  

-Marina Richter, ASIAN MOVIE PULSE

SCREENINGS

New York City Theatrical Release - Metrograph, NYC

Slamdance Film Festival, USA - Honorable Mention for Breakout Feature

Cinema du Réel - Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul, South Korea

RIDM - Montreal International Documentary Film Festival, Canada

Prismatic Ground Film Series - Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC         

Krakow Film Festival - Krakow, Poland 

Asian American International Film Festival - NYC

San Diego Asian Film Festival

Si Loin Si Proche Film Festival, France

Festival Film Dokumenter, Indonesia

Black Canvas Film Festival, Mexico

CREDITS

Director & Producer: Kimi Takesue
Cinematographer / Sound / Editor: Kimi Takesue
Co-Producers: Richard Beenen, Sophie Luo
Consulting Producers: Sarah Archambault, Karin Chien
Colorist: Chris DiBerardino
Re-recording Sound Mixer: Tom Efinger
Sound Editor: Abigail Savage
Audio Post Facility: Red Hook Post
Post Production Picture Finishing: Postworks New York
Postworks Account Executive: Pete Olshansky
Postworks Finishing Producer: Patriciana Temicela
Publicist: Sylvia Savadjian
Closed Captions: Cheryl Green
Marketing & Distribution Assistant: Alex Su, Aderet Fishbane