Beginning Friday, February 16, Onlookers, the latest intimately captivating feature from award-winning documentary filmmaker, Kim Takesue, opens for a one-week NY exclusive theatrical run at Metrograph In Theater and arrives exclusively at Metrograph At Home for a month-long streaming run on Friday, February 23.
In her third feature, Takesue turns her camera on tourists and travelers in Laos, observing how they react and respond to the local populations while also providing the opportunity for viewers to reflect on their roles as observers in everyday life. A rich, meditative film about looking at people who have come to look, made up of painterly, precisely composed tableaux that both reveal the picturesque beauty of the local landscape and question the concept of the “picturesque,” all while revealing the persistence of colonial assumptions in contemporary package tourism. U.S. Theatrical Premiere.
Director Kimi Takesue is in attendance for introductions and Q&As for screenings taking place from Friday, February 16 through Sunday, February 18. Screening as part of Fire Over Water: Films of Transcendence, running from January 26 to February 25 In Theater. Takasue’s previous feature films, 95 and 6 to Go (2016) and Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), will be available on Metrograph At Home as part of the Kimi Takesue Showcase, running from February 16 to March 16 on the platform.
Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in documentary, experimental, and narrative genres. Takesue’s films have screened at more than 250 film festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, Toronto, New Directors/New Films, Cinéma du Reel, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA, and have aired on PBS, IFC, and the Sundance Channel. Takesue is the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as the “Breakthrough Award” from Chicken and Egg Pictures recognizing women who have made significant contributions to the documentary field.
Takesue’s feature documentary 95 and 6 to Go, a portrait of her Japanese American grandfather in Hawai’i, was nominated for the 2017 European Doc Alliance Award and screened at over twenty-five international film festivals, including CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, DOC NYC, and Dok Leipzig. The film won the Special Jury Prize for Best Documentary Film at Indie Memphis and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific International Film Festival. Takesue’s critically acclaimed Ugandan feature documentary Where Are You Taking Me? was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam and premiered at the festival, followed by screenings at MoMA Documentary Fortnight and the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it was a Critics’ Pick by Time Out New York and LA Weekly. Takesue’s films have received positive reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Variety, BOMB Magazine, The Nation, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. Her films are distributed by Women Make Movies, New Day Films, and the Criterion Channel. Takesue is Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.
