“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 navigate their favorite dating apps) of New Yorkers during the physically distanced COVID summer, had me unexpectedly riveted. Through a variety of participants — spanning age, sex, sexuality, gender-identity and race — we become privy to the strangest of sociological experiments. Rather than any deep dive into the state of our collective love lives, or a statement on the often elusive promises of big tech, we get a fascinating visual realization of process itself. By allowing the searchers to focus intently on the task at hand (and not the camera in their face) we’re able to watch in real time how physically reaching out, tapping — and attempting to touch another human being through an inanimate object — radically alters natural behaviors, and thus perhaps even our desires. Which, inevitably, only led me to more questions. Luckily, Filmmaker was able to reach out and connect with the director behind Searchers as well as 2013’s Manakamana (co-directed with Stephanie Spray) and 2017’s The Reagan Show (co-directed with Sierra Pettengill) just prior to the film’s January 30 online premiere in the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT section.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.