Kimi Takesue

Synopsis

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 feature documentary, Where Are You Taking Me? Employing an 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. Where Are You Taking Me? offers multi-faceted portraits of Ugandans and their country, exploring the complex interplay between the observer and the observed. This cinematic journey challenges notions of the familiar and the exotic. Where are we going... and what will we find? 

Press

"Beautiful, fascinating… scenes appear as artfully composed as a painting (and some reminiscent of famed painters). But these are found moments, and they have movement and character as well as poetry ... an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation."
          - David DeWitt, The New York Times

"Beautifully meditative ... an uplifting observational documentary that plays on seeing and being seen."
          - Jay Weissberg, Variety

"An extraordinary postwar Uganda dream flight. 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, Village Voice

"Grade: A! Marvelous! Takesue has a wonderful eye for human portraiture, and for landscape portraiture, that is arresting without being static. She captures, as she intended, the lyricism of the everyday."
          - Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

CRITIC'S PICK!
"An amazing journey...In her impressive documentary feature debut, Kimi Takesue interrogates the outsider's gaze while still offering an expansive wide-angle view of contemporary Uganda."
          - Eric Hynes, Time Out New York

CRITIC'S PICK!
"Wonderfully composed images... A poetic corrective to lingering stereotypes." 
          - Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly

"A precisely observed, gracefully contemplative, and gently self-reflective portrait of contemporary Uganda."  
          - Educational Media Reviews Online

"Stellar... Takesue's documentary took the explosive subject of former Ugandan child soldiers in an unexpected direction; instead of choosing the usual routes of investigative journalism or bombastic commentary, the film keeps its distance from the traumatized youngsters and observes them with detached empathy as they readjust to 'normalcy'." 
          - Richard Porton, Cineaste

"Inspiring depth of purpose in this lyrical film...Takesue traveled alone with a camera to post-civil-war Uganda in 2010, shooting ambling, vivid footage that captured both street rhythms and rural rituals as she moved between urban Kampala and the open spaces of the countryside. There are no subtitles, narration or expert witnesses, only a generous immersive eye."
           - Steve Dollar, The Wall Street Journal

Selected Screenings

International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands
Los Angeles Film Festival, CA (Documentary Competition)
MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY
Goteborg International Film Festival, Sweden
African, Asian & Latin American Internat'l Film Festival, Italy
International Film Festival Kerala, India
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio
Amakula International Film Festival, Kampala, Uganda
Planete Doc International Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland
Black Movie: Geneva International Film Festival, Switzerland
San Diego Asian Film Festival, CA
Big Screen Project, NY, NY
Multicultural Film Fest., University of Massachusetts, Amherst
UCLA Film & Television Archives, Los Angles, CA
Cornell Cinema, Ithaca, NY

Credits

Director, Producer, Cinematographer: Kimi Takesue
Editors: Kimi Takesue & John Walter
Co-Producer: Richard Beenen
Re-recording Sound Mixer: Tom Efinger
Production Company: Kimikat Productions
In Association with: Lane Street Pictures