Film

Director Kimi  Takesue presents an immersive and visually striking meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country’s dusty roads and tranquil rivers, Onlookers takes viewers on a sensorial journey of deep looking and listening, inviting audiences to reflect on their own modes of tourism, while asking looming existential questions.

In the introduction to his famous dialogues with Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut attempts to describe the essence of tension in a cinematic scene through an example of a dinner party’s cross-directional dance of gazes— a matter of who’s looking at whom, and with what hidden motivations. Kimi Takesue’s Onlookers then, 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