REVIEWS
REVIEWS
“Where Are You Taking Me is an uplifting observational documentary that plays on seeing and being seen. Though the premise of commissioning non-Africans to reveal the "Dark Continent" to (largely) white arthouse audiences can be seen as suspect, Takesue's beautifully meditative work is aware of its outsider status… Lovely transitions, via image and sound, and striking compositions make the pic an
enriching experience.”
“Beautiful, fascinating… Some scenes appear as artfully composed as a painting (and some reminiscent of famed painters). But they are found moments, and they have movement and character as well as poetry…the film is an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.”
A documentarian crosses borders, then erases them entirely.
Four Stars
Critic’s Film Pick of the Week!
“Why do we travel to foreign lands, and what are we hoping to find? How do we distinguish between our preconceived projections of nations and the reality of what’s in front of us? In her impressive documentary feature debut, Kimi Takesue interrogates the outsider’s gaze while still offering an expansive, wide-angle view of contemporary Uganda. She eloquently employs the vocabulary of objective cinema—prolonged static shots, fly-on-the-wall perspective—to paint a knowingly subjective portrait that’s somewhere between Cubist travelogue and epic poetic reportage. A young man sits placidly in the chaotic swirl of cars and pedestrians moving along a hectic city street. Takesue pointedly and playfully punctures our exotic notions of wild Africa: A shot of a fiercely fanged lion pulls back to reveal Day-Glo–shirted schoolkids at a zoo; children laboring in a rock quarry turn out to be participating in an on-location film shoot.
Though the country’s social and political ills are left largely out of frame—an AIDS-awareness T- shirt makes a memorable cameo—we’re never allowed to forget that we’re trespassing. Passersby glare into the camera, and subtitles are never furnished for non-English dialogue. The only time a subject directly addresses Takesue, it’s with a doozy of a query: “Why are you taking my story to USA, New York?” The answer is as complex as the film itself, and as simple as deciding to not look away.”
CRITIC’S PICK!
“For the first several minutes of director Kimi Takesue's documentary, viewers may well be asking the question in the film's title. Delivered sans voice-over or any establishingcontext, Takesue's film drops the audience into an elliptical journey through layers of life in modern Uganda: a high-society wedding (whose groom looks like he's attending a funeral); a female weight-lifting competition; a break-dance battle that's stolen by a young child. Once you're acclimated to the unforced pace, the wonderfully composed images (some quite painterly) wash over you. It's only near the end that any reference to the country's bloody history arises, and you realize you've been watching a poetic corrective to lingering stereotypes.”
- Ernest Hardy, LA WEEKLY
“Just as voiceover and story arcs are endemic to most theatrically distributed docs, exposition in most selections here is, by inverse convention, DIY. Thus you get the extraordinary postwar Uganda dream flight of Kimi Takesue’s Where Are You Taking Me?, which begins by dropping us in medias res at a bustling curbside in Kampala before tunneling through bubbly weddings, soul-thrumming drum circles, a girls’ weightlifting tournament, and more. Takesue’s askew angles, sealed-off compositions, and embrace of return glances foster the strange beauty, humor, and disorientation so rare in the global glut of hard-drive-dump docs. The physical grace of her subjects and the detergent-ad brilliance of the colorful clothes don’t hurt, either, nor does the music. (A little girl taking her turn in a breakdance-off is alone worth the price of admission.) But the secret weapon here is Takesue’s unnerving ability to zoom with uncanny focus into (and out of) individual perspectives—with or without close-ups—building to one electric encounter with her outsider-chronicler status: “Why you want to go with it there?” asks one seemingly edge-of- tears teenager of his New York–bound image.”
- Nicolas Rapold, THE VILLAGE VOICE
"Stellar! Takesue's documentary took the explosive subject of former Ugandan child soldiers in an unexpected direction; instead of choosing the usual routes of investigative journalism or bombastic commentary, the film keeps its distance from the traumatized youngsters and observes them with detached empathy as they readjust to ‘normalcy’.”
”Inspiring depth of purpose in this lyrical film...Takesue traveled alone with a camera to post-civil-war Uganda in 2010, shooting ambling, vivid footage that captured both street rhythms and rural rituals as she moved between urban Kampala and the open spaces of the countryside. There are no subtitles, narration or expert witnesses, only a generous immersive eye."
- Steve Dollar, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘Where Are You Taking Me?’ is an observational documentary that lets the images tell the story.
“The marvelous documentary "Where Are You Taking Me?" was originally commissioned by Rotterdam's international film festival in conjunction with a series on African cinema. The Asian- American director, Kimi Takesue, who has an extensive career in documentaries and teaches film at Syracuse University, had never traveled to Africa. Along with 11 other international filmmakers, she and local African filmmakers were given no-strings commissions to make pieces for the festival. It sounds like a documentarian's dream, and from the look of the film, that's just what it was.
As Takesue has written: "I was particularly excited to participate in this project because my film work often deals with various kinds of cross-cultural encounters. I am interested in the process of 'looking' cross-culturally, and the interplay between the observer and the observed."
This may make the movie sound like some sort of ethnographic field trip, but it's far more lyrical than that. What the film is really about, as Takesue has said elsewhere, is "finding poetic moments in the everyday." The film has no driving agenda, no overbearing story arc.
Since the movie was shot in Uganda in the aftermath of its brutal civil wars, her approach, which dispenses with voice-over narration and even subtitles, may at first seem unconscionably arty. But I think she is right to work in this way. The film doesn't dispense with the horrors of the wars, it just mitigates the pain by finding in the people, the countryside, a revivifying beauty. The movie is both a representation of and a testament to healing.
Takesue's biracial background – she grew up in Hawaii and Massachusetts with an Asian- American father and Caucasian mother – no doubt contributes to her sensitivity to those "cross- cultural encounters." But she has a principled reticence when it comes to recording the Ugandans. She often lets her camera, at a discrete distance from its subject, simply register the human activity in its sights. The film's opening shot, for example, of a busy street corner
in Kampala, is a microcosm of Ugandan city life, with motorbikers, women toting children, businessmen, beggars. By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.
This tactic, of course, only works if there is something worth looking at in the first place. Fortunately, the Uganda of this film is almost brazenly photogenic, and no more so than with the faces of the people themselves. Takesue has a wonderful eye for human portraiture, and for landscape portraiture, that is arresting without being static. She captures, as she intended, the lyricism of the everyday.
We are taken seemingly everywhere in the country, from Kampala to rural villages. We see a high-society wedding, with the bride and groom as crisply fashioned as figures atop a wedding cake; we observe a women's weight lifting competition held in the banquet room of a fancy hotel. In another sequence, a video VJ does live translations of Bruce Lee films in the local Lugandan language to a roomful of sleepyheaded kids. Boxers at a makeshift outdoor gym spar furiously in rhythmic pirouettes. We visit a movie set where what looks like a pulp action film is being shot. (Later on we see snippets from such a film inside a darkened theater.
An impromptu break dancing competition turns into a joyful whirligig, especially when, to the onlookers' delight, a little girl wanders into the circle to try out moves. In the marketplaces, where the wares include colored fabrics of almost incandescent brightness, Takesue, who is always off camera, registers the curiosity and wariness her presence elicits from the vendors. A few people duck the camera altogether; others stare stonily into it or embrace it with wide smiles. They surely feel, and rightly so, that they are not zoo specimens, and Takesue is careful to respect their sympathies. And yet, in the end, she gets what she wants, even from those who turn away from her. The turning away, she seems to say, is part of the story, too.
One group that does not turn away are the children. In the second half of the film she concentrates on Hope North School, a refuge for children, some diagnosed with AIDS, many of them former child soldiers forced to commit unspeakable atrocities. These orphans and castoffs are rehabilitated here. They are given the gift of rediscovering human connections in peacetime. This is one part of the film that could have used a bit more context, but we get the message anyway. We get it not only in the rompy scenes with young kids mugging for the camera but also in the shot of a stricken-looking older boy who talks about how he dreams of guns and asks Takesue, "Why are you taking my story to USA New York?"
If he were to see this film, he would know why.”
Grade: A
- Peter Rainer, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR