How long has it been since you’ve looked at Tinder? Or OkCupid? Or Grindr? Or SeekingArrangement? Five minutes? Five months? Five years? No matter where you are in your search for love, happy or heartbroken or somewhere in between, Pacho Velez’s Searchers will scratch all of your online dating itches.

The documentary, which is screening as a part of AFI DOCS this week, takes an intimate and naturalistic view of online dating in New York. It follows a wide swath of strangers as they swipe their way through dating apps and talk candidly about what they want. From quick hook ups to lifelong connections, Searchers takes you through a diverse pool of dating preferences. We caught up with director Pacho Velez (who includes his own love life in the film) to chat about dating in your 90s, coded language and the perfect New York date night. It’s the movie equivalent of watching your closest friends swipe left or right.

What was the catalyst for creating Searchers? Why did you want to explore online dating?

There were two starting points. One was my own sort of experiences with it and realizing how much time I spent trying to meet people this way, and having really good experiences and really bad experiences with it, and feeling curious about what it was like for other people… The people on the other side of the screen. You’re sitting there and you’re swiping right and left and you’re passing hundreds of people, maybe thousands over the course of a year. Who are those people? Who are they looking for? Are they having a better time or a worse time than I am? What are their strategies? You start to wonder about all of those things, so the film was a great way to get inside all of other people’s experiences of these apps. 

And then I also had a student who had a 91-year-old grandfather. He had just gotten divorced after 60 years of marriage, his wife left him. She was like, “I don’t want to die with you.” 

That’s rough!

Yeah, so he moved from LA to New York and he started online dating. 

Was he successful?

Yeah, he was really successful… So I was hearing these stories about what it was like to be an older person in New York from my student… 

And then I also have a third kind of random association, but I didn’t get a smart phone until fairly late. Not terribly late, but maybe like 2014.

That’s definitely a little later in the game. 

A little bit. I just remember my friends had them, and I just saw them on their phones all the time. I was kind of annoyed by it. I remember I went on a trip with someone I was dating to Europe and I felt she spent a third of the trip just staring at her iPhone instead of looking at Italy. 

I was frustrated by that, but then when I got my own iPhone I was like, “Oh! It’s really hard to take your head out of this thing.” I started to feel like more and more we’re all living our lives online. What does that look like? How do you represent the virtual world? This place that we’re spending more and more of our day, how do you put that on the screen?

The film is all about these really intimate interviews with people who are online dating. How did you find these people and how did you narrow these interviews down?

Coming into it, I knew that it needed a range of perspectives. I was just thinking about that sense of scope in every direction I could think of, class, race, gender, sexual preference. Not that it was going to be a categorical film, because I think that would feel bad, but it was New York and New York is a wildly diverse place. The film needed to reflect that. Part of that was trying to cast as wide of a next as I could. I did a lot of outreach myself, trying to find either friends or friends of friends. I teach at a university here in New York and I had a lot of my former students help me do outreach. The co-producer on the film, Milo, spent weeks on apps. He was technically catfishing. In the bio he explained what we were up to, but he would change his gender, he would change his sexual preference, he would change his age, just to try to connect with different kinds of people. He would try different apps. He was really key in bringing in a lot of voices.

Also, at some point, we did even try posting a couple of ads on backstage.com. Just to see if that would bring in some other kinds of people. Our criteria was that we really want to film with people who were actually, actively online dating. They were honestly looking. We filmed about 75 people and there are maybe 45 in the film. The way that we cut it down was that we stuck with the people who were the most upfront and honest. And I would say vulnerable. Some of the people we filmed… You know, you get in front of the camera and you realize that you feel a little self conscious about it and you start giggling. There were a couple of people like that and that wasn’t working for the film. Or if your interests or your preferences were… I hate to say cliche… but if it was exactly what one would expect you’d do, then we usually would cut those people out. 

The people who were thrilling were folks like Helene, who is 88-years-old and she and her friend Jan are talking about age and how older men always want to date younger women, which was sort of an expected point. We’ve heard that before. That’s probably true…

But it’s not interesting.

Yeah, but then Helene said, “I’m the same way. I don’t want to date anyone over 60. I want to date a young man, I totally get it.” I was like “Oh, there, bam, that’s insightful.” That’s turning the expectations on their head. I was like, “Okay, that’s definitely going to be in the film.” I knew that was us.

Did you know right away if you were going to keep some of the interviews? Or did that come later while you were editing?

There were definitely some that were touchstones all of the way through. Cathleen at the beginning when she’s talking about how men signal that they want sex.

Yes, that’s such an interesting scene. 

You’ve gotta make it clear, but if you make it too clear you’re kind of gross. There were all of these euphemisms inside of what is an extremely blunt and direct tool.

Right and you can see how different online dating is depending on your age group and how those rules change. Someone younger wouldn’t have an issue saying, “Just looking for someone to hook up with” or, “Just looking for something casual” but there are entirely different rules for the older age group. 

Yeah, for sure. Cathleen is reading these three page essays about what they’re looking for and then you get to Austin and the guy is like “Into?” That’s all you get. 

It’s really the same thing which is funny, it’s just different ways of packaging it.

Yeah for sure. So Cathleen was definitely going to be in, Austin and Olivia were definitely going to be a part of the film. But the one that sort of stood out when we were filming it was the last story, Jon’s story of finding love. When he says that part about how his partner made him feel beautiful, and that you don’t get that a lot. We were just balling in the room. We were all in tears, it was just so touching. That was the first building block where we knew it was going to be near the end.

Some of the stories are funny and some of the stories are tragic, but that one really hits you. It’s just a beautiful love letter to this person he cared about. 

So, Jon ended up passing away. He had a heart attack a week before we found out about Sundance. So he hadn’t seen the film. He didn’t know it was out there in the world. But the guy he’s talking about, his name is Paul, his ex. Milo, my intrepid search assistant, went through Jon’s Facebook and found a Paul who is in a lot of photos with Jon from way back and we think that’s the Paul.

Have you guys reached out to him?

Not yet. We’re going to do it… This is an annoying thing where the film still hasn’t actually played in a theater in the United States. AFI [DOCS] is the first time it’s actually in a movie theater. That’s the first time it’s actually going to play to an audience. It doesn’t have a screening in New York yet.

Oh wow, that must be driving you up a wall. It’s such a New York film.

Yeah, it’s New Yorkers in love. I want to show it this summer. I’ve been reaching out and hopefully we’ll find some venues.

What would be your dream New York venue? What’s the perfect situation?

I would love to show it at one of the park screenings this summer. Like a date night at Bryant Park or something.

I was just about to say, that’s the perfect date night. Go to a park, take a picnic and watch a movie that’s about people trying to fall in love.

And feel how lucky you are that you’re there with someone!

I mean, one of the things I really enjoyed about the film is that there was a sense of voyeurism, you want to see how other people date, but it doesn’t feel exploitative. It’s almost like when your friend lets you take their phone and swipe for them and you just get to see what comes up.

Obviously, there’s always the question of voyeurism in a documentary. That question and the ethics around it were part of the thinking in terms of including myself. If I’m going to subject other people to this, I should make sure that I can do it myself. So that was definitely part of it. The other part of it was, because of the way that we were working, we only worked with enthusiastic people. People who are not like, “I don’t know if I want to share, maybe I do, maybe I don’t,” the people we were going for were like, “Hell yes. I’ve been waiting to go off about online dating for years.” 

If someone fell in love during the doc, or they started dating someone they met during the doc, would you have included that story? Or were you uninterested in that part of online dating?

Some people did start dating people that they swiped on, but for me, it was more about the community of the app than it was about success or failure. It was really thinking about, who are these people on the other side of the screen? What are they after? And what is the shared endeavor that we’re all a part of? It’s the community of online dating and how we’re together and apart at the same time.

One of the things that becomes clear during the film is that you’re friends with some of the subjects. Were you more nervous to interview people you knew than strangers, or did it not bother you either way?

I think the challenges were different. Some people in the film I knew fairly well, like Amber was someone I went to college with. We don’t hang out all of the time, but I’ve known her for 20 years. People’s sexualities develop, so the way I knew her as a 19-year-old was very different than as a 40-year-old. And so, I wanted to give her the space to express her sexuality as she understands it now rather than my old ideas about it.

But it was nice because I felt like equals with her. Some of the other people were attached to The New School, where I teach, so that was sometimes a little nerve wracking in another way. Nobody was my student at the time that I was filming them, but there’s implicit power dynamics inside of that. So being certain that my questions were being met with enthusiastic consent was important for me in that process. It was something that I had to interrogate and re-interrogate as it was happening.

There was only one time that there was an awkwardness… Or a question I asked and the person later contacted me and said, “Can you not use that?” It was someone talking about a one night stand and how wonderful it was because the person asked for very clear consent all the way through the encounter. I followed it up with a question about did you ever feel concerned for your safety inside of the encounter? Or have there been other times online where you’ve been concerned for your safety when going on other dates with people? She said “No,” but then later said, “I’d rather not include that in the film,” so it’s not in the film.

I know this is a small part of the documentary, but do you think the film would have been different if it wasn’t shot during the pandemic? Do you think you would have gotten different answers or seen different scenarios? A lot of my friends who were online dating did things they might not have done before. I had a friend who started dating someone who lived in a totally distant city. I have a friend who has been dating someone for months, but they’ve only been on a couple of in person dates. Did you see any of those more unusual dating scenarios?

There was some of that. A little bit of the difference is that you’re describing people who are making matches and really, the minute you made a match, you’re out of the film. But certainly the things that people were looking for, and some of the things that people were willing to do, changed. 

I always think of that question when making a film, like how much of the contemporary moment to include in it? It’s obviously like, right now we both understand the politics of the pandemic and we’re already familiar with it. It’s something that, obviously, the film has to deal with in some way. But also the search for love and the search for human connection has been going on forever. So I also wanted the film to speak to that. There’s only one mention of being inside the quarantine or being after the quarantine in the film. Part of that was just about it not wanting to feel overly tied to 2020. If people see it a few years from now, it’ll still be contemporary, hopefully.

Searchers begins virtual screenings as part of AFI DOCS on June 25. An in person screening at AFI Silver Spring is at 8:15 p.m., June 26

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