onlookers
OPENS AT METROGRAPH february 16

In her third feature, Kimi Takesue turns her camera on tourists and travellers in Laos, observing how they react and respond to the local populations while also providing the opportunity for viewers to reflect on our own 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.