Kimi Takesue’s Handmade Films

Kimi Takesue is a whole crew unto herself. Travelling with a relatively portable set-up (everything fits in a bag that sits on her lap), she is often producer, director, cinematographer and editor of her work all at once. This self-sufficiency allows the award-winning filmmaker to shoot in an unobtrusive manner and craft the kind of films she has come to be known for: quiet, intimate and daring depictions about encountering the other in foreign landscapes. The handmade nature of such filmmaking serves to fortify the undeniable subjectivity present in her films. 

This March, Takesue is set to present her first mid-career retrospective in Asia at the Asian Film Archive (AFA), The Cross-Cultural Gaze. Her retrospective comes as part of AFA’s film programme Look / See: The Female Gaze in Cinema which invites the audience to spend prolonged periods of time in the company of women in their daily rituals. Timed to coincide with the celebration of International Women’s Day, the programme includes a 4K presentation of the recently restored Peter Weir classic Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), a 2K screening of Sight and Sound’s newly-minted best film of all time, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976) and the Singapore premiere of Yvonne Rainer’s Film About a Woman Who… (1974). Takesue’s work will also be screened alongside Lana Gogoberidze’s Mother and Daughter, or the Night is Never Complete (2023) and Anna Hints’ Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023). Between Gogoberidze tracing the tradition of women making films in her family through personal and film archives and Hint’s fellowship with the women in a series of sauna confessions, Takesue’s lovely home movie about her grandfather, Tom Takesue in 95 and 6 to Go (2016), followed by her travelogues Where Are You Taking Me? (2010) and Onlookers (2021) present the viewpoint of the doubled outsider. 

In an interview with Reverse Shot, Takesue described Onlookers as a postcard. As she notes in the following conversation, the front of a postcard often depicts a scenic destination spot that is most representative of an image primed for tourists to circulate. Takesue sits for extended periods at a given space to watch as the scene unfolds itself, often grappling with her own sense of alienation as a multiracial American and the role of the traveller-tourist she takes up herself in her travels in Uganda (Where Are Your Taking Me?, Peru (Looking for Adventure, 2013) and Laos (Onlookers). Her portraits do not discriminate between the tourist wandering into her frame, the locals setting up their wares, or herself implicated in the act of touristic consumption. Her work, then, functions as postcard films that seek to disrupt mindless consumption in favour of prolonged immersion in anticipation of a meaningful encounter, much like the writing of a private, personal encounter at the back of a postcard. With straightforward honesty and curiosity, Takesue sets up a confrontation between herself, the image and the audience about what it means to look, often voyeuristically, at the scene in front of them. 

Takesue was at the tail end of a residency in Texas when we first met through a video call. Our conversation continued through emails. We speak about drawing strength from her aunt’s artistic impulse, the centralisation of her subjectivity in her work and her obligation as a filmmaker. This interview has been edited for clarity.  

 

SASHA HAN (SH): Let’s start at the beginning. You were born to a Japanese-American father and an Italian-German American mother. You lived in Hawai’i until the age of seven. After your parents’ divorce, you shuttled between the island and Massachusetts. In your youth, you pursued theatre before finding your way into film at university, where you completed a degree in cultural and women’s studies. Why were you first drawn to theatre? 

KIMI TAKESUE (KS): As a child, I was a solitary person and had the tendency to play alone. It’s not to say that I didn’t have friends, but I could occupy myself. I think theatre allowed me to be transported and express myself in ways that were difficult for me to express otherwise. I also liked comedy, which felt quite intuitive, and I really enjoyed dance — hula and jazz — as well.

SH: What was your earliest vivid encounter with film? We see in your second feature 95 and 6 to Go that your grandfather had this delightful reflex to dream up plot beats for the film you were developing. I was wondering if that had to do with film traditions you had in your family growing up.

KS: People assume that I was influenced by my mother, a retired professor who published several books on Frederick Wiseman, but I actually did not have any interest in film when I was young. I remember picking her up from graduate school and peering into the auditorium to see the 16mm film projections that were playing, though I never watched them properly. These days, my mother is one of the first audiences for my films and I’m really fortunate for that.

Some of my early vivid memories were of films like Grease (1978), which I love. My aunt, who is mentioned in 95 and 60 to Go, took me to see Grease, which she disapproved of. She thought it was such fluff! My aunt was a very important figure for me when I was growing up. Here was this obedient, Japanese-American woman who was raised in a traditional way before she broke away and was disowned by the family. She took this strong independent path, becoming politically active and an accomplished weaver in her travels, before returning to Hawai’i to reconcile with my grandparents. She made a real impression on me because she introduced me to the arts and taught me batik and tie-dye. When I was five years-old, she gave me my first camera, a snap camera with a little flash cube on the top.

My aunt also treated me as an equal. I remember being very conscious about how I couldn’t get away with things when I was with her because she held me accountable, like an equal. I always felt after she died that I carried some aspect of her spirit with me. 

 

SH: Your pivot towards filmmaking took place while you were completing a degree in Cultural and Women’s Studies. Soon after, you made your first work, Bound (1995), a short narrative film that combines your love for theatre and dance in highly stylised choreographed sequences of a Chinese British woman untangling herself from fabric and figuring out her own path — literally, as she crosses the landscape. I found the experimental shots in Bound beautiful, though I read that by the end of shooting it, you felt trapped in the confines of the tunnel vision of your project. What was so compelling about the images that made you turn your attention from academia and devote yourself to it? I’m also curious about why you initially focused on making narrative films.

KS: I began thinking in more complex ways about being Asian American in college. I was also introduced to feminism and very inspired by people like Trinh T. Minh-ha, UK collectives like Sankofa and the Black Audio Film Collective. Initially, it was stimulating to see how they were theorising questions of identity so my initial interest in film was about that. In some ways I was more enamored with their writing and their personalities as public figures. You can see in the first short film Bound (1995) that it was more a translation of ideas into film. It was such an identity-based film. It expressed this inner conflict I had of how an identity defined around race, gender and politicisation is both empowering and restrictive. Bound gave me the initial form and direction but was ultimately reductive.

When I was living in London, I would go to repertory cinemas and watch Beat Takeshi Kitano, Abbas Kiarostami and Wong Kar Wai. Once I became interested in film however, I became hesitant about exposing myself too much and being too influenced. I think I was trying to understand what to do intuitively. I find teaching fascinating because a lot of my students don’t have a background in film. It’s exciting to see their intuitive way of seeing the world that we’re all trying to tap into, develop and understand. In a similar vein, I didn’t want to make work that would have to rely on additional writing to fully appreciate, so I made a decision and pulled back from that mode. 

It’s not about being simplistic. I’m thinking about how people who are masters in their field like to pare something down to its essence. That kind of simplicity is very hard to achieve as a maker. My work is still based on a critical mode of thinking, but I wanted to make films that had a lot of points of entry for people so it wouldn’t be necessary to read something before getting excited about it.

SH: You’ve published an essay about your time in London and working as a coat-check girl while making films. Why did you leave the US for the UK? What did you learn there?

KT: I finished my undergraduate degree in the U.K.. I had lived in New York City for a summer and got involved with film organisations like Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel before getting the opportunity to go to London while in Oberlin College. For me, London was so cosmopolitan — more so than New York because I was exposed to the arts there in a totally global sense. I had this desire to search for Asian women filmmaker role models, but I eventually realised that I had to find my own way. 

I met people who were attending art school at St. Martin’s but I knew I wasn’t ready to be in a space where there was a lot of competition. I come from a family of teachers and academics so it always felt like something I would pursue later. Before that though, I had to protect myself a bit and see what my level of interest was. It was also to prove to myself what my level of commitment and sacrifice was to actually pursue filmmaking. But I might have normalised suffering in my relationship to filmmaking.

SH: Were you putting the money that you earned as a coat-check girl into Bound?

KT: No, I was just using that to survive. Like most of my films, I didn’t pay myself for Bound because I was always conscious of not going into debt which means it didn’t cost much. It’s been mostly me putting in my labor for my films.

SH: What was the transition between narrative and documentary filmmaking like? 

KT: One of the things we haven’t really talked about was the challenge I set out for myself to understand what is distinct and unique about my point of view and way of seeing. They are informed so much by my being bi-racial, having to move between different cultural zones and learning from a young age to find a way to be a chameleon to blend in and be an observer in different cultural circumstances. The positionality in my films is always as an outsider. It’s in my narrative and documentary films. In both types of films there are these seemingly different people who have cross-cultural encounters and enact unlikely friendships.

The point I’m trying to make is there was never really a conscious decision to pivot. It happened more because of the trauma of not being able to make this big feature film with prominent people attached that’s mentioned in 95 and 60 to Go. It was devastating when I had everything together creatively but the money was not raised. I almost gave up filmmaking entirely. Then I pivoted and made Suspended (2009). It felt like going back to myself because I realised I still had the capacity to make work with no money in a very self-sufficient way. That I could work without any mythologising and instead as a pure form of expression. That was the determining factor in deciding that I will not pursue filmmaking that relied on other people for my livelihood. It had to be something I was able to do on my own.

 

SH: I noticed that your early documentary work like Heaven’s Crossroad (2002) and Suspended retained the stylistic and editing flair of your early narrative films. You’ve arrived at a point where you’ve cut through all the embellishments and you’re just simply looking at the frame. There’s this sense of self-containment and insularity in your later documentaries.

KT: The camera is responsive to the situation. When I was in Vietnam in the mid-90s, there were practically no tourists. There’s a different kind of warmth in Heaven’s Crossroad (2002) because I was intimately involved with Vietnamese people. In Where Are You Taking Me? there’s more of a pulsation between intimacy and distance. Uganda was not a popular tourist destination then, so, again, I encountered very few tourists. In Uganda, I wandered around Kampala as a foreign traveler and at other times, was invited into private spaces. I met Okello Sam, who was a friend of a friend, who invited me to a wedding and a school for children affected by the civil war that he’d founded. Rather than take a sensationalist view at the school, Hope-North, I was interested in showing these young people engaged in the natural rhythms of daily life at the school. Trauma has impacted their lives, but it certainly does not define the entirety of their being.

That said, while there is something very special that access and intimacy offers a filmmaker, there are also unique possibilities and different insights to glean through alienation and distance. There’s a coldness in Looking for Adventure where I was on a group tour, having a completely prescribed and formulaic experience. The coldness speaks to the limitations resulting from a lack of cross-cultural connection. There was this sense of existential despair. Why am I doing this? Why am I traveling? What am I actually getting out of this experience? 

I travelled independently in Onlookers so there’s more freedom but it’s still a standardised itinerary. You can see how young people, where there’s this illusion that they are more free, wind up following the same itinerary and hanging out together within their familiar groups. I’m commenting from the vantage point of an outsider and looking at the limitations and possibilities of what I can comment on. My camera is small and light so I can be unobtrusive. There’s strength in looking from a distance — a wide shot of what’s going on — which reflects my own experience of experiencing emotional distance from things.

 

SH: I’m thinking of how holding the camera to document something reflects what you’re saying as well, because it means you’re both the outsider watching and a participant in the scene in front of you.

KT: What’s always happening is this interplay between naturalism and stylisation. The authored frame is always interrupted. What’s interesting to me is my assertion of control over the formal frame. It’s highly composed but then there’s all this spontaneous interruption, like with the kids that I interacted with in Onlookers. These encounters are unpredictable and simply unfold. In that sense, the outsider and insider are constantly changing and shifting.

SH: You often cite Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” when talking about your work. When you set up a shot, what are you waiting for? Are there conditions that have to be met?

KT: I find a precise, formal composition and tableau and then wait for spontaneous, yet seemingly choreographed, magic and meaning to unfold within the frame. The advantage of working in this intimate way is that I can be slow and patient. With this kind of filmmaking it becomes a kind of meditation. It is enjoying being present then seeing a moment that brings me some visual pleasure. It can be architecture, the way graphic lines interact with color or how people enter the frame and consume a space. 

SH: You’ve also described your work as postcard-like in framing. I was wondering if you see your work as a postcard to be sent and delivered. Do you have a recipient in mind?

KT: Certain films of mine have a “postcard-like” quality in terms of the tendency that I have to aestheticise places, people and situations. As a visual person I am constantly searching for a beautiful composition. At the same time, I’m exposing the limitations of a voyeuristic gaze. I’m interested in also challenging and disrupting the aestheticising gaze. Onlookers explores aspects of travel and tourism in Laos. It is literally structured in static tableaus that are reminiscent of “picture perfect” postcards. Yet, throughout the film I’m challenging the idealisation and exotification of culture by emphasising everyday moments and the unspooling of life’s minutiae. I am trying to bring awareness to the complicated ways in which an outsider consumes and “looks at” cultural differences. The ultimate recipient of the work is the curious viewer who wants to go for the ride, opens their senses and embraces self-reflection.

 

SH: In 95 and 60 Go, your grandfather said that what distinguishes a Japanese person from another is obligation. It was such a striking term to use and I wanted to expand on it. What do you think is the obligation of a filmmaker?

KT: The obligation of the filmmaker is having true curiosity and respect for who and what you’re filming. There are a lot of questions that come up around my work about ethics, how much I know or identify with who I’m filming. Ultimately, I see my obligation as rendering situations with nuance and complexity. I’m fundamentally filming people who I feel a humanist connection to. I do so with a deep sense of identification, curiosity, empathy, interest, self-reflection and self-awareness about my position as an outsider to interrogate and celebrate it. It’s never to separate myself from who I am filming. 

One thing that is distinctive about the films presented at AFA is that they are all hand-made films with a singular point of view. My subjectivity and way of seeing are very present in my films. I try to be honest and accountable, as well. I don’t believe in erasing points of tension; I retain the questioning and confrontation I receive in the films. Of course, we have to talk about what you can film. Is it just yourself and your family? Because the same issues relating to power and potential exploitation apply. How does consent work in the context of a family when you’re talking about family members who love you and want you to succeed and so they don’t feel they can say no? All of these things are constantly present and being navigated. Can we ever fully resolve them? I’m raising them not only with sensitivity but genuine humility too, because I cannot answer that. I’m grappling with it too. 

 

SH: Yes, you produce, direct, shoot and edit almost all of your films, which means you’re at the receiving end of your subject’s curiosity, questioning and annoyance. I think about how the former child soldier in Where Are You Taking Me? questions you on why you want to take his story to New York.

KT: The title of the film, Where Are You Taking Me? is a question that applies to the viewer, the Ugandans in the film, and to myself, as the filmmaker. For the subjects represented within the documentary, the question “Where are you taking me?” also moves beyond curiosity into a confrontation of the politics and ethics of making a documentary. How are these images being gathered and for what use? How will these images be disseminated and consumed? What right do I have to take these pictures? Sometimes the question registers in a subject’s eyes — perhaps as annoyance, but in the specific case you mentioned, the young man confronts me directly. In reality, the two of us had a long and intense conversation about this very topic. Ultimately, I left it unanswered and hanging within the film because I think it is more impactful to raise the larger questions for the viewer and to implicate the viewer, as well. In the end, I always ask if I’ve conducted myself with integrity and if I am representing people with respect, empathy and fairness.

SH: You’re about to present a mid-career retrospective of your features at the Asian Film Archive. What does growth mean to you these days?

KT: We’re conditioned to think that growth is based on films becoming bigger in scale, money and distribution. Even if you’re successful in making something on your own it’s difficult to compete since you don’t have the apparatus behind you to get it out into the world and additional people involved to help amplify the project. The reality is if you’re not upping on some scale or addressing topics that are considered urgent, there’s little support and little money. But I can’t make the kind of work I want that way. I embrace the smallness of my films and what that offers me. Ultimately, I can’t make films like Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go and Onlookers with a crew of people. These films require intimacy, spontaneity and the ability to intuitively respond to life as it unfolds. I have to slow down and let go of an agenda. I can’t be dictated by a schedule or budget. When I film alone at my own rhythm, I have the ability to capture small, beautiful, profound moments in life that could easily be lost and go unnoticed.

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About the Writer

Sasha Han is a film writer seeking to reify the fugitive effects of looking through language. Broadly, her interests lie in examining the circulation of images in Southeast Asia. She is an alumnus of critics labs at the Locarno Film Festival, Far East Film Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF). Her writing has been published by MUBI Notebook, the Southeast Asian-based MARG1N magazine, Variety and the Asian Film Archive. Since 2021, she has worked with SGIFF as part of its preselection committee, synopsis writer and most recently, as part of editorial for its film magazine Atlas.

About the Filmmaker

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker recognized for her work across documentary, narrative, and experimental genres. Her films have screened widely at international festivals and museums including the Sundance Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has received prestigious honours, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. Takesue was the recipient of the “Breakthrough Award” and Fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures honouring women filmmakers who have made a significant contribution to the documentary field. Her recent film Onlookers was named one of the best documentaries of 2024 by The New York Times and had a theatrical release at Metrograph in New York City.

In 2025, Takesue will have her first retrospective in Asia at the esteemed Asian Film Archive in Singapore. She is Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at Rutgers University-Newark.

 

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of the Asian Film Archive.