Join us for the fifth and final installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today, featuring director Kimi Takesue in person!

Named as one of the best documentaries of 2024 by The New York Times, ONLOOKERS offers a visually striking, immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how people live as observers. The film traverses the country’s dusty roads and tranquil rivers, unfolding elaborate painterly tableaus and 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 the people of Laos to continue with their daily lives. It transports viewers on a sensorial journey of deep looking and listening, inviting audiences to reflect on their own modes of tourism, their reasons for traveling, and what they hope to find in the process.

Directed by Kimi Takesue. Country: United States. 72 min. Lao and English.