- Director: Kimi Takesue
- Country: USA
- Year: 2023
Onlookers offers a visually striking, immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country’s dusty roads and tranquil rivers, we watch as elaborate painterly tableaus unfold, revealing the whimsical and at times disruptive interweaving of locals and foreigners in rest and play. Drawn to spectacle, tourists swarm to magnificent Buddhist temples, the ordered rituals of monks, and sites of dazzling natural beauty, then recede like a passing tide, leaving Laotians to continue with their daily lives.
This film will be available to stream until midnight on Sunday, August 31, 2025.
Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker/artist whose films have screened widely at festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, Rotterdam, Cinéma du Réel, CPH:DOX, SXSW, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art and have aired/streamed on PBS, IFC, the Sundance Channel and the Criterion Channel. Takesue is the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as the “Chicken & Egg Award” from Chicken and Egg Pictures honoring women filmmakers who have made a significant contribution to the documentary field. Her recent documentary Onlookers premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival where it was awarded an Honorable Mention for Breakout Features and enjoyed a successful theatrical run at Metrograph in New York City. Metrograph At Home further celebrated Takesue’s work via streaming with a “Kimi Takesue Showcase” which included her three acclaimed feature documentaries: Onlookers, 95 and 6 To Go and Where Are You Taking Me? Onlookers was one of three documentaries highlighted by The New York Times as “The Best Documentaries of 2024, So Far.”