Heaven’s Crossroad

A film by Kimi Takesue

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SYNOPSIS

HEAVEN'S CROSSROAD traces an impressionistic journey through Vietnam exploring the nuances and complexities of “looking” cross-culturally. Structured in a series of observational yet stylized vignettes, this visually driven experimental documentary investigates shifting relationships of voyeurism and intimacy, while linking the observer with the observed. Takesue’s mesmerizing cinematography captures sweeping country landscapes and cities in motion, provoking questions about what it means to truly see another culture.

HEAVEN'S CROSSROAD charts a singular journey yet it also explores common desires which surface through travel: the desire to be transported to another place; to communicate beyond language; the desire to arrest time and repossess a moment, a glance, a feeling, an encounter—transforming mundane events into moments of surprising beauty and an utterly new way of seeing.

PRESS

"A treasure...A lyric travelogue."

Nathan Lee New York Sun

"An extended mediation on the nature of sight...recalls nothing so much as the travel diary of a master poet."

Peter X. Feng, Ph.D. University of Delaware

"Delivers a beautiful panoply of people, places, colors, languages and sounds from contemporary nothern Vietnam...would serve well in courses in anthropology, film studies, Southeast Asian studies and other fields moving beyond the older conceits of cross-cultural communication."

Glen Mimura, Asian American Studies University of CA, Irvine

"A visual and sensory feast of contrasts, of movement and stillness, travelling and homecoming...a journey to Vietnam like no other."

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Women's Studies Syracuse University

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Vancouver International Film Festival
Mill Valley Film Festival
Rotterdam International Film Festival
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Slamdance Film Festival- Spirit of Slamdance Award
Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema- Best Documentary
Black Maria Film & Video Festival- Juror's Choice Award
Locarno International Film Festival
Calgary International Film Festival
Portland Institute of Contemporary Art

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Kimi Takesue

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker and recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film. In 2018, she received a highly-competitive national Breakthrough Award and fellowship from Chicken and Egg Pictures. Other honors include a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, two fellowships from NYFA, a Kodak Cinematography Fellowship, and grants from Catapult, ITVS, NYSCA, and the Arts Council of England. She is a six-time fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.

Takesue's documentary 95 AND 6 TO GO was nominated for the prestigious 2017 European Doc Alliance Award. The film screened at over twenty-five international festivals including CPH:DOX, Dok Leipzig, DOC NYC, Doclisboa, BAFICI-Buenos Aires International Festival of Cinema, and Krakow Film Festival. The film garnered Special Jury Prizes for Best Documentary at Indie Memphis and the Los Angeles Asian International Film Festival.

Takesue's acclaimed documentary WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME? was commissioned by the Rotterdam Film Festival and premiered at the festival, followed by screenings at MoMA-Doc Fortnight and the LA Film Festival. The film was theatrically released by Icarus Films and was a Critics Pick by Time Out-NYC and LA Weekly. Takesue's films have screened at more than two hundred festivals/museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, New Directors/New Films, SXSW, and the Museum of Modern Art-NYC and have aired on PBS, IFC, Comcast, and the Sundance Channel. Her films have received positive reviews from The New York Times, Variety, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor and The Nation. Takesue's films are distributed by Women Make Movies, New Day Films, and Icarus. (7/19)

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MATERIALS

Press Kit

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This beautiful short drama exquisitely explores the unlikely bond that develops between two people from different worlds. Eight-year old Juliette sits at the side of the local pool waiting for another lonely summer day to pass when an unexpected pair of Japanese newcomers arrives. Fascinated by the mysterious black-clad woman and her yakuza assistant, Juliette transforms an ordinary day into an imaginative adventure, embarking on a surreal journey of discovery. Tender and beautifully hypnotic, Summer of the Serpent raises provocative questions about difference and desire. It also artfully explores representations of Asians on film, Asian masculinity, and cross-cultural encounters through the story of one young woman’s burgeoning sexuality.

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Surname Viet Given Name Nam

Vietnamese-born Trinh T. Minh-ha’s profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society.

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Forgetting Vietnam

One of the myths surrounding the creation of Vietnam involves a fight between two dragons whose intertwined bodies fell into the South China Sea and formed Vietnam’s curving S-shaped coastline. Influential feminist theorist and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s lyrical film essay commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the war draws inspiration from ancient legend and from water as a force evoked in every aspect of Vietnamese culture. Minh-ha’s classic Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) used no original footage shot in the country; in Forgetting Vietnam images of contemporary life unfold as a dialogue between land and water—the elements that form the term "country." Fragments of text and song evoke the echoes and traces of a trauma of international proportions. The encounter between the ancient as related to the solid earth, and the new as related to the liquid changes in a time of rapid globalization, creates a third space of historical and cultural re-memory—what local inhabitants, immigrants and veterans remember of yesterday’s stories to comment on today’s events.

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