‘Nowhere Near’ REVIEW: Traces of Home in a Foreign Land
‘Nowhere Near’ REVIEW: Traces of Home in a Foreign Land
“An edited film is an assemblage of broken parts. The cut is where images are put together. It is also the line where they are fractured. Cuts can be imagined as bridges or borders, from one image onto another. An entry and exit point.”
How does an undocumented documentary filmmaker document themselves? That’s the enigma that Miko Revereza tries to unravel in this documentary that probes into the complex web of colonialism in the Philippines, investigating how Miko’s family navigates such divides and rifts into their lives as an immigrant—particularly one that is undocumented. A personal memoir of immigration, and elusiveness of identity and home—how we try to define ourselves, Revereza’s Nowhere Near tries to forge various creative techniques and forgoes the conventional form to trace his soil in a foreign land.
In an attempt to piece together his family history against the backdrop of colonization and immigration, Revereza exhibits the depths of his being through a combination of narration, archive pictures, Google Maps, and even the use of clarinet sounds that seem to have emerged from the frustrations on bureaucracy. He sets out on an exploration back to the Philippines to piece together the fragmented histories of their family. Revereza uses an almost abstract, metaphorical approach in exploring their personal histories; evocative of Akerman’s New’s from Home and Marker’s Sans Soleil in the way it conveys the cross-cultural image of Statelessness. Unglamorized in its nature—the outcome is a probing documentary scattered with the filmmaker’s poetic narration, that delves into the undercurrents of geographical alienation through overlaid imagery and buried family portraits.
In collecting fragments of the past, Revereza’s conscious and raw storytelling helps us navigate the vexing process of finding the documents of his family and discovering their fractured history while also struggling to search for his own soil. He creates this stunning visual poetry by lamenting at those fragments of his family’s life and skillfully translates complicated emotions to the screen. There’s an influential use of multiple-exposure images, and instead of serenity and peace, there’s an inkling of disillusionment via his archives. And with that, we come to understand Revereza’s unwavering frustration of being an immigrant. What I like about his approach is how it masks what people ought to feel, and disrupts that sense of conformity, especially for the American audience where they can afford to remain neutral on politics, while Miko navigates through the bureaucratic landscapes of the U.S.
I think what I find intriguing about Nowhere Near is there’s a sense of uprooting. multiple scenes of water and mangroves that somewhat relate to the filmmaker himself; Mangroves entwined in their nature despite lacking in soil. I admire Miko’s interest in its water currents, using it as a motif in his film, simply putting images of people in the water and seeing where it goes. Personal yet political, Revereza’s Nowhere is an amalgamation of a complicated web of missing histories and lack of belonging. He has an eye for blending all these unstable footage and imperfect photographs and I admire him for it—It shows his struggle and frustration. His being an immigrant and undocumented gives him a double vision of sorts, and with that, It gives his frames a distinctive feeling. There’s something so profound in the way Miko reflects on the history of his family. The way he ruminates on the abandoned graves, lost tombstones inside a church, and photos of his parents with their heads cut off so they could use them as their passport photos. He transforms even the most ordinary objects into something so poetic and it’s impressive that he can piece such complex records and produce something so sharp.
Miko Revereza's Nowhere Near shows how colonialism erases entire people and structures, even lineages and histories. There's something so potent and human in this memoir about the fear of statelessness and colonial trauma. It is something so spiritual and metaphysical.
Nowhere Near was screened at QCinema 2023 as part of the QCDox category.
