PTA: After [making] my short films, I realized I navigate towards a direction both naturalistic and stylized, as you said. That possibly came from my experience as a wedding videographer. A wedding video needs authentic moments of the couple—they are not actors, so they just need to express that authentic emotion and I am there to “frame” it, creating a beautiful image. I experimented with that in my shorts, but there is more that is out of my control on the set of a feature film. I waited intensely for moments where the weather, people, animals, everything aligned. In my many takes of a scene, I only stopped reshooting once I found something sacred that could not be captured in any other take. 

KT: That balance is so delicate, and it’s so hard to successfully achieve without being pretentious. I think you do it beautifully.

ADN: Ân, speaking of weddings, I noticed that you often structure your narratives around a person’s life-altering moments, which we also see in The Mute and Stay Awake, Be Ready. The stories center around situations with heightened emotions: weddings, deaths, funerals, a lover’s rejection, accidents, family break-ups, etc. Yet, your focus is on the more mundane details, sometimes making these universal experiences seem mystical. 

PTA: That’s correct, I conceptualize my cinema as turning mundanity into something more grandiose. Like turning the pebbles on the side of the road into gold, or as the Bible verse goes: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord had done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.” I observe people on the fringes of society, or a slice of a personal milestone, and seek in it a sense of empathy. It is hard to find empathy, for the contemporary world moves so rapidly. It is only accessible when we slow down. 

ADN: Kimi, I’m wondering if you can elaborate on your approach to making a cinematic portrait? While 95 And 6 To Go is a meticulous, intimate, and, at times, humorous portrait of your grandpa, Where Are You Taking Me? feels like a portrait of the Ugandan people at a very specific point in history. While portraits usually call into question the agency of the subject, and the filmmaker’s intentions towards them, in your films I can see your appreciation for the details of the subjects’ everyday lives, but I also came to love how present you are, especially when they’re shown reacting directly to you.  

KT: Like Ân, much of my interest in portraiture is guided by empathy and in giving attention to people who are often overlooked. This can even happen in one’s family. 95 And 6 To Go is a portrait of my Japanese American grandfather in Hawai’i who was a postal worker, and who I had underestimated in so many ways. Growing up, I always saw him as a pragmatic man lacking creativity, so I was shocked when he became interested in the screenplay I was writing and began generating clever ideas for the script. I began filming him; the camera became a catalyst for me to see him in his complexity.

Where Are You Taking Me? was filmed in Uganda, and in it I focus my attention on moments of everyday life that could easily be missed, and also highlight different aspects of the cross-cultural encounters, exploring the interplay between the observer and observed. I’m particularly interested in the communication that happens outside of language, and is conveyed through gesture, body language, and the gaze. I often show the ways that the returned gaze changes and evolves over time. For example, there’s a scene where a young man is calling out to potential customers for his minibus taxi. He notices me and at first gives me a flirtatious wink—then his reaction shifts to curiosity, slight annoyance, then boredom. I love to show the spectrum of human emotions and to implicate the viewer in the act of looking.