In her newest documentary WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?, award-winning film festival veteran Kimi Takesue (SUMMER OF THE SERPENT, Festival 2005; SUSPENCE) succeeds once more to challenge the habits of viewing and moving in the world. The film's title is indeed and paradoxically the only orientation we have; the core question that leads us to connect with and string together the diverse images of public and private, rural and urban places in contemporary Uganda. Presenting us with daily life in an African country long torn by civil wars, the director refrains from dictating a narrative of knowledge and evaluation. Instead, Takesue allows for the places and people to affect her own vision and movement and to reciprocate her gaze. Spectacle then is at the heart of this work, while any sensational or didactic moves are absent. Takesue is a silent observer, but she is equally observed, ignored and addressed. She is not welcome everywhere but comfortable enough to let go of the convenience of vision as power and control.

 Loosening images from their usual context and embedding them within the filmic cosmos of seemingly incompatible moments — former child soldiers, a pompous wedding, the African Women's weightlifting competition, a visit to the local cinema — the filmmaker opens up a rhythm of life and passing transmitted from the images themselves. Time is indeed relieved from a strictly linear dictation and makes place for encounters and entanglements not yet named, classified and organized. Yet does the filmmaker never merge with her environment but finds herself at once located and displaced as an elite Asian American female artist in a traumatized society; a society we find to be full of life, necessities, simplicities and pleasures — movements and gestures not only of desperation and survival but of happiness and satisfaction. Where are you taking me? To an unexpected discovery of the self.

Synopsis written by: Feng-Mei Heberer