Searchers
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Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 1 (Steve Dollar): The Pink Cloud, In the Earth, Searchers
Something about sitting alone in my living room in the Florida Panhandle, staring at a 55-inch television screen, watching actors playing people alone in their homes staring at screens, while outside an invisible virus continued to wreak havoc on a world radically and irreversibly changed from only a year ago, really defined a lot of my experience with this week’s largely virtual Sundance Film Festival. Of course, festivals worldwide have made the pivot to online presentation, and they’re getting better and better at it. Meanwhile, it’s become almost habitual to describe a film as uncanny or prescient in the way […]
by Steve Dollar on Feb 2, 2021 -
“The Subjects in Our Film Brought a Lot of Life Back to My World”: Editor Hannah Buck on Searchers
Dating’s complicated arc during the pandemic has been lovingly captured in Pacho Velez’s documentary Searchers. Whether on Grindr, Tinder, or any other app, the question “what are you looking for?” varies from person to person amid the chaos of mid-COVID New York City. Editor Hannah Buck addresses the challenge of introducing the director as a subject of the film and the value of mediated experiences. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Buck: In 2019 I was the consulting […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“Online Dating Operates Through a Skein of Lenses”: DPs Martin DiCicco and Daniel Claridge on Searchers
Dating’s complicated arc during the pandemic has been lovingly captured in Pacho Velez’s documentary Searchers. Whether on Grindr, Tinder, or any other app, the question “what are you looking for?” varies from person to person amid the chaos of mid-COVID New York City. DPs Martin DiCicco and Daniel Claridge tell us how they framed Velez as one of the film’s most vital subjects as well as the parallels between film and dating profiles. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2021 -
“I Wanted the Film to Feel Like an Online Dating Hall of Mirrors”: Pacho Velez on his Sundance-Debuting Searchers
As someone who came of age at a time when looking for a potential partner(s), be it for a lifetime or one night, was less a neat calculated exercise and more a messy spontaneous surprise, I’ve never quite understood the appeal of online dating. Seeking love and/or sex via swipe just always seemed creepily clinical and controlled, cold and robotic — about as sexy as in vitro fertilization to my mind. And yet watching Pacho Velez’s Searchers, an exploration of online connecting through the eyes (literally, as Velez’s Interrotron-style setup allows his characters to look directly at us as they […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 30, 2021 -
“I Usually Avoid Celebrating Birthdays, But it Felt Important to Embrace This One”: Director Pacho Velez | Searchers
How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? I imagine that many directors are writing about COVID or the BLM protests, and both of those events shaped Searchers, but I also experienced a more personal milestone—my fortieth birthday. I usually avoid celebrating birthdays, but it felt important to embrace this one. Then came the pandemic, and I spent the day like every other lockdown day, reading the news, listening to podcasts, and experimenting in the kitchen. Besides the symbolic weight of forty, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2021
