In Miko Revereza’s full length feature Nowhere Near, he captures two journeys that have a similar thread. The first is an investigation of what happened to his family’s applications for green cards. That starts out with an interview with his mother who doesn’t really know all the details of how that all went down. With that first journey, he reaches a dead end. And perhaps because of that, he foregoes his brief attempt at conventionalism and goes into experimental methods. Which brings us to his second journey to the Philippines with his grandmother and relatives. He hopes to find the tombstone of someone from his mother’s side of the family, probably, who held an important position there. This journey proves to be more fruitful.
I’ll admit a certain bias here. Revereza’s family comes from the same province as my late paternal grandfather. The seaside town where one of his ancestors ruled is an hour’s drive away from my grandfather’s summer home. But thankfully, Nowhere Near doesn’t rely on nostalgia and hopes that some critics get it more than others. He uses one experimental method on top of another – archive footage, meta-narration, palimpsest, and shaky cinematography. For some reason, it mostly works, showing how the past floods into the present, leaving those in the diaspora without an anchor. The film is abreast with most conversations about post-colonialization. And it personally excites me to see how Revereza uses his next films to take that discourse into its more progressive steps.
- Rated: NR
- Genre: Documentary, Experimental
- Release Date: 9/11/2023
- Directed by: Miko Revereza
- Produced by: Shireen Seno
- Studio: Los Otros Films
