Audio Version
(Listening time: 21 minutes)
Miko Revereza’s ‘Nowhere Near’ opened the 2023 Open City Documentary Festival in London on a muggy evening in early September. It was the first time the director had travelled outside of his new home of Mexico to attend a film festival since moving there as a political act. Revereza has said this to be the last film he will make on the subject of his experience within the restrictive and often arbitrary immigration system in the U.S., after his debut feature, ‘No Data Plan’, also a deeply personal account of displacement.
The day after his premiere, we sat down with Revereza who told us how his film was fundamentally an attempt to trace a family curse through debt, language, and the violent reverberations of colonisation in the Philippines. We speak to him about his formal experimentation through the use of poetic expression, an editing process based on memory as an organisational method, and the intervention of the physical body on the moving image. In effect, these aesthetic impulses reflect Revereza’s desire to make an account of his subjectivity, while still preserving a certain degree of illegibility.
—Tatum Howey
Tatum Howey: The title of your most recent film, ‘Nowhere Near’, is an interesting linguistic manoeuvre because it is in the negative: nowhere near. Could you tell us a little bit about that choice?
Miko Revereza: I took the title from a song by Yo La Tango, from his album, ‘Painful’, which I really like. Over the years I’ve been working with different titles for the project. When I first started making films at community college – when I was around 19 – I had an idea for a feature film and I started gathering footage in a similar vein to this film, and I made a trailer for it too. And then I just put the title there because I liked the song “Nowhere Near”. The lyrics go “Everyone is here but you’re nowhere near”. Years later I found this to be appropriate for the project. Like you said, it is an interesting negative, and I felt it relates to the state of exile. Like everyone you know is in some defined place, but you can’t join them there.
TH: It’s interesting that you bring up the word “exile” because ‘Nowhere Near’ opens with a Roberto Bolaño quote: “I’d lost a country/but won a dream”. Bolaño, who lived in Spain for most of his adult life, is arguably one of Chile’s most famous literary exiles.
MR: He lived in Mexico too.
TH: Yes! He was briefly imprisoned in Chile because when he was in Mexico his accent had ‘mutated’. So, the police booked him for being what they called “a foreign terrorist”.
MR: I wanted to recall Roberto Bolaño because he was in exile in Mexico. And then there is this poem, “Romantic Dogs”, which resonates so strongly with the affect of being in exile. It’s sad, but in his words there’s agency and there’s freedom. What a statement to say: “I lost a country but I won a dream”. It’s a very conscious decision to leave a country to pursue a dream. It means that it was worth leaving and losing a country to obtain this greater freedom.
TH: There is a very rich literary history that is associated with being in exile, whether that exile is self-imposed or forced. The narration in ‘Nowhere Near’ uses poetic methods: the sentence structure, the line breaks, the breath. You struggle for enunciation. What is it about exile for you that produces the need for enunciation and also the need for testimony?
MR: The literary techniques are something that I’m not aware of. I’m publishing something with Wendy’s Subway, but I don’t have a literary background. Sometimes I feel like an imposter in that world. In all worlds. But that’s kind of my way into things. Art also, and film.
When it comes to enunciation, or testimony, it took me a long time to get to the point of writing this film. I felt incapable of voicing precisely what it was I needed to voice, but the film required it. In previous films, I would get away with other methods: subtitles without the voice-over, as in ‘No Data Plan’. But in this film, I didn’t want to take any shortcuts. I needed to find a way to write the voice, which was the most difficult part because I was trying to come up with the most comprehensive indictment of the U.S.––something I had experienced as an undocumented immigrant––and the impossibility of living that dream. It took a long time to comprehend it through writing. I would get lost in everything that I needed to write in order to constellate everything.
TH: Your films are very meditative, in the sense that you tend to linger on poetic capsules in your environment. A lot of your images are very self-contained: they are tightly framed and restrictive, and, in turn, resist interpretation. In watching your work, those close-up shots seem to outnumber the wide-angle shots.
MR: It’s interesting you point out the wide versus the telephoto. At one point when I was filming ‘No Data Plan’ I thought: ‘Last year I took this train ride and filmed in wide. Why not zoom in this time?’ Seeing in telephoto, details emerge, very minute details, like a crack in something, a handprint, like little threads. I was really into that, finding little details that move delicately. And that has become more my mode of photography, not necessarily close-up, but telephoto’d in. Maybe this will change too, but I like that point of view and how people or objects move within it really fast. If the camera is focused on something very close, then movement is amplified.
Sun Park: What do you think about performativity in camera operating? It’s interesting how we can perceive you so clearly as the camera operator, even at those points when you’re not in the frame. It’s made especially obvious when the camera is shaking during the scene at the church: the audience can sense the nervousness and tension through your body.
MR: They’re inseparable. When the camera is handheld, the body movement is the camera movement is the moving image. It’s personal in that I’m holding it, my body is informing the shake, the particular frame. I like the term “moving image”, because that’s what it is, it’s how the image moves. But I also like the idea of moving in the sense of relocating, it’s the relocating image. A camera moves with me like luggage. Its presence is something that I have to declare, I have to deal with the weight, the value of the camera as it moves with me from place to place, country to country, and then – as you note – from within the shot itself. I feel a direct relation to the materiality of the image and how it’s made. I like to compose images unconsciously. I don’t really straighten things out or try to think so much about the composition, but just lift the camera up and let it land where it does. Perhaps that has to do with an interest in the past with street photography. But it’s a tendency that I do: the first framing is the best framing for me.
TH: That’s interesting because I feel your film that you made in collaboration with your partner Carolina Fusilier, ‘El Lado Quieto’ demonstrates an almost mechanical precision in its camera movements –
MR: That’s the exception.
TH: In some interviews you’ve said how Tagalog is filled with loanwords from English and Spanish. ‘Loanwords’ is striking because it suggests an economy, as in a loan; as you say in the film, it suggests that you are constantly indebted or subordinate to another. Could you expand on your relationship to language more broadly?
MR: Exactly, and the film asks: who’s collecting the interest?
I wanted to try to deconstruct our debt, my family’s debt. My father worked at a car factory and during the recession it closed down. After 9/11 there were new requirements for employment that he was unable to meet, and he needed to take out loans in order to keep going. For me, it’s about thinking about the source of debt––deconstructing [the] financial debt and linking it [together]. This was the deeper level of the film: trying to find the source of the debt which is the family curse. It’s retracing their financial instability, their indebtedness of the present day: “oh, that has to do with the recession, which has to do with the 9/11 era. And then how do we go from there? That involves the relationship to the U.S., the desire to migrate from the Philippines. And how much further back does that go? To the Spanish occupation and 300 years of subordination from the religion that was loaned to us. The levels of imposition of Catholicism [that] continues to this day”.
TH: I wanted to read this quote from a Filipino historian, Reynaldo Ileto: “one has only begun to reflect upon those crucial moments when the state or the historian or whoever occupies the site of the dominant centre performs a cutting operation, remembering or furthering that which it deems meaningful for its concept of development and forgetting or suppressing the dissonant, disorderly, irrational, archaic, and subversive.”
He is talking about rewriting an alternative history of the Philippines, and what he says about “a cutting operation” made me think so much about your work. You’ve mentioned this idea of fragmentation through the edit, the cut, and I think you even referred to Freud. I’m curious what you think about this relationship between the cut, film and memory––what can film do for memory?
MR: First I want to go back to the cut and then how it connects to language. Because there’s a shot in the film that shows a laptop and there is some writing, and it does mention Freud.
TH: That’s what I thought I saw.
MR: A critical theorist named Sarita See, she’s Filipina, has been a mentor to me. She has a text called ‘The Decolonized Eye’ about Filipino American art. In one passage she talks about, “heridas de la lengua”, like “wounds of the tongue”, when a dominant language is imposed onto the colonised subject and they’ve lost language, they have the wounds of the tongue, the melancholia of not having the capacity to name what is lost.
In order to grieve, you need at least to be able to name what you’ve lost. But within the colonised subject, within a language full of loanwords, they’re incapable of naming the loss. Throughout the film I wanted to try and articulate that frustration, of not really knowing what is lost but trying to get to the centre of it. One of the later gestures that I put into the film is when I blow the clarinet inarticulately. This felt like that “wounds of the tongue”.
The film was really hard to edit, and it’s gone through so many different cuts. Organisation is a crucial part of the editing because in order to edit I need to find the location [psychically and on the computer] where the memory is stored. Then gradually throughout the process of editing, it just became “I know where to take this piece”, creating a map, a mental map of where I can access memory. Literally the timeline becomes this concise thing of: “ah, this is from this folder, from folder 45, this is from 16, and this has Pangasinan, this is from Minnesota”. It’s interesting, just the technicality and practicality of the digital editing system.
TH: Literally a database. I remember you comparing those composite images, the surface of someone’s skin superimposed over a river for example, in ‘Nowhere Near’ with the idea of folding a map.
SP: You mentioned Ocean Vuong earlier in your talk with Alia Syed. Vuong has said, in reference to the death of his mother, that “grieving is the last and final translation of love”. Can filmmaking be a translation? Or like, lost memory?
MR: I was thinking about dealing with family in this way, through difficult subjects related to the family, fraught relationships… But I wouldn’t go there if there wasn’t love. I wouldn’t have invested the time and the attention to doing this investigation. The impetus of this quest to find the source of our debt. That was something I wrote down as a statement for the goal of this film: lift the family curse. And in order to––in a Miyazaki-esque sort of way, this fantasy of returning to the grandmother’s province––find the stone in the ancestral province that will lift the curse. I don’t know if it did that, if it was successful. But in some ways I feel lighter and freed, or maybe just relieved. And then I think maybe this film is a curse. It was such a difficult film. I didn’t think that filmmaking was this difficult until I met this film. I thought I was never going to bring it to completion. Now that it’s premiered, I’m so glad to see it on screen before I die.
SP: In the premiere we heard some laughs, and your voice has humour in it, which is new compared to your previous films. Humour is often a coping mechanism for those who are racialised or marginalised. When you were improvising on the clarinet [with intermittent sputtering], we couldn’t tell if you were laughing or angry. It was very poignant to think about humour against the frustration.
MR: It was so nice to watch it with an audience and get some laughs. There were parts where people laughed where I wasn’t expecting a laugh. It can be funny. But I think it goes back to the voice. I do feel like I have a sense of humour, at least when I’m at home. It took me a long time to write the film, but I tried to write it honestly, in the same way I speak. Once I discovered that mode of writing, humour emerged kind of randomly. How I convey humour––and maybe it’s with how it’s phrased––[is] like little jabs, little things that could be funny. I think with this film I gave myself permission to write and speak. It’s the film in which I feel most like myself. Maybe it has the most of my personality, more than other films. It feels like it’s a conversation and it shifts depending on whom I’m addressing. Sometimes I’m speaking to my dad and there’s a point of anger. Or I’m talking to an audience or to my grandmother and it shifts.
My family is super funny, unintentionally. My grandmother has been a through line in a lot of my films because she’s such a gossip. I’ve relied on her and I have so much love for her. I go over, she cooks me food, and then she’ll just gossip about whatever in a super funny way, which can be offensive or reveals a class mentality, but says it in a way that’s just so human and invulnerable where she just doesn’t care. I’ve always appreciated her as a personality, and really miss her when I’m away from her, and the fact that I can’t just go over and have her speak into my film. Also of course there’s that super funny line from my mother when she mistakes 9/11 for 7/11. It’s just brilliant.
This interview was conducted by Tatum Howey and Sun Park as part of Another Gaze’s critics workshop at Open City Documentary Festival 2023, and published in conjunction with the online exhibition, ‘Miko Revereza: ‘Nowhere Near’ open from 7 – 16 March 2025.
Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is an award winning experimental filmmaker who has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile; DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021) and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and holds an MFA from Bard College.
Tatum Howey is a writer and doctoral candidate based in LA whose work circles around questions of visuality and the political implications and potentials of risk. Their research is currently centered on the artist Hamad Butt, a seropositive artist making toxic work at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Their writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Wonder Press, ‘The Capilano Review, Commo Magazine’, and ‘Mimesis: Film as Performance Magazine’.
Sun Park is an artist and cultural worker based in London. Working with moving image and language, her practice is shaped by improvisation and ongoing conversations. She is currently exploring gossip, friendship, and risk while researching Cosmotechnics, Asian Futurism, and feminist remembering of war with the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR). She is also the Events and Marketing Manager at LUX.
