Image courtesy of Asterlight
It’s summer in New York, a time of mild respite from the COVID crisis. Across the city, young and old alike are looking for romance, companionship or sex. And they’re all using online dating apps in the hope of connecting with the perfect match.
Filmmaker Pacho Velez is one of the lonely hearts. His very new documentary Searchers (sold by Submarine and world-premiering at Sundance) features over 70 kindred spirits, of every race, class, gender, sexuality and age, staring at profiles on their cell phones, swiping right or swiping left, saying yes or no or maybe.
“The criteria for me was somebody who was going to have an interesting take which was not what you would expect,” Velez reflects on how he chose his subjects. There might be a woman in her 80s on the lookout for younger men or someone in his 20s who’ll hook up with a partner on the basis of a jokey, irreverent profile.
Velez is an Assistant Professor, teaching a course in documentary at The New School in New York City. He used his connections there among students and faculty to “penetrate parts of the city that I myself don’t usually have access to.”
For most of the film, the director is behind the camera asking the questions, but we do see him from time to time. We also hear about the current state of his love life.
“At first, I really hoped it would be all other people. I’ve made a few other films that way, talking to a range of folks, but in the edit room it became clear that the film needed another voice. It needed somebody to hold it together,” Velez explains his own participation. “You always ask the question when you’re making a film, why this film? Why now? What is important about this? Why should anybody care? My answer as director is that it is something that I have really been struggling with in my own life…and so I had to stick myself in it. It was deeply embarrassing.”
“I’ve never put myself in front of the camera before – but it had to be done!” he concedes.
Much of Searchers consists of big close-ups of faces. They are staring at their smartphone screens, looking at profiles of would-be dates. Velez’s trick was to hook his subjects’ phones and computers up to a teleprompter and to project this in front of the camera lens. That means it looks as if they are looking directly at us, the audience, as they stare at the screens and weigh up the merits of their potential dates on Match or Tinder. The response messages are superimposed on the screen. Searchers thereby provides the cinematic equivalent of being an app.
Velez and his editor Hannah Buck went to painstaking lengths to ensure that the film had a narrative momentum and didn’t just seem like interviews thrown together randomly. “The film has to feel like it is unfolding for the audience. It has to feel that each new person or situation has added something that the audience hasn’t seen before,” the director says.
Searchers may have been almost entirely shot during the pandemic, yet it generally has a light and uplifting mood. “The summer in New York, thankfully things [COVID] did settle down somewhat. So with testing, distancing and masks, people did feel comfortable being part of the film…people wanted to get on with their lives, go outside, chat with their friends – and be in love. You realise that romance, personal connections and intimacy are the first thing people look for. If they are being fed, [if] they’re being sheltered, the next thing to worry about is love. That is where people’s minds were this summer.”
Looking for love through dating apps has its anguishes. As the director’s mother Marion (who puts in a brief appearance) points out, “subjecting yourself to rejection affects how you feel.”
In spite of the downsides, most of the subjects retain their optimism and humour.
“It really is something I am going through myself,” Velez reflects on the resilience and eternal optimism of the city’s dating community. “I am feeling a bit of my own crisis about how you meet people, especially about how you meet people during the pandemic when it is so hard to feel comfortable sitting in the same room as somebody or sitting at a table with somebody. To see all those people who are still out there and trying to connect was really inspiring for me.”
Having dealt with the love lives of New Yorkers in the Big Apple, Velez is now at the early stages of preparing a new project…on UFO sightings in upstate New York. No, the director hasn’t spotted any spaceships or flying saucers himself. “It’s more an enthusiasm for the people who report experiences,” he says of what is drawing him from one twilight world into another.
