Kimi Takesue’s new film, Onlookers, is a playful and reflective examination of the dynamics of the gaze. The filmmaker observes the interactions between travelers and locals in Laos, where she is on sabbatical. Her camera rejects both the gaze of the tourist fascinated by the exotic landscape and the gaze of the commentator satirizing the tourist and settles into the fine line where the gazes of tourists and locals intersect. This approach, which draws on her longstanding critical insights into ethnography, makes tourists, locals, and film-makers alike both subjects and objects of the gaze, and invites audiences to rethink the one-size-fits-all images that over-tourism and social media produce. Without directly referencing history, the film also reminds us of Western colonialism in Southeast Asia and considers Laos' place in global capitalism. In this way, Kimi Takesue's insightful audiovisual essay reminds us that it is still possible and necessary to see in a different way. And that this is why we travel.