Nowhere Near
-
Festival Report: The 2023 JIO MAMI Mumbai Film Festival
“Things are bad all over,” I thought to myself, as I left ceasefire protests in New York to attend a film festival in Bombay, India, whose recent news cycle included the political persecution of writer Arundhati Roy for a comment made about Kashmir in 2010 — indicating an opportunistically timed defense of occupation. India, too, agreed to send 1,000 workers to Israel as replacements for deported Gazans (before Indian trade unions refused in protest), and the country’s military remains Israel’s biggest arms client. All of this gave me a queasy feeling as I was thrust into the pomp of the […]
by Inney Prakash on Dec 20, 2023 -
Exorcising the Curse of the US: Miko Revereza on Nowhere Near
After living undocumented in the US for 26 years, in Nowhere Near (2023), director Miko Revereza journeys back to the Philippines in an attempt to trace the source of the colonial ghosts causing his parents’ amnesia. Through an abstract odyssey into personal history à la Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Revereza works in a range of mediums to express the borderless aesthetic of statelessness. What results is an investigative documentary layered with the narration of his own novel, floating into the mysteries of psychogeographical disconnect with superimposed images and submerged family portraits. On the day of the film’s US premiere, Revereza […]
by Dylan Foley on Oct 10, 2023 -
TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near
Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2023
