The Still Side

A culmination of several years of shooting, editing, relocation, and reflection—acclaimed experimental filmmaker Miko Revereza forges a personal and profound portrait of immigration, disillusionment, and the elusiveness of home.

Living in the USA illegally for over 20 years, Miko Revereza reflects on his family's relocation from Manila to Los Angeles in this introspective essay film. Patching together self-portraiture and home-movie footage, his sombre yet resolute voice-over contemplates the weight of postcolonial history and obstructed futures on diasporic identities.

A voiceless narrator rehashes details about his mother’s affair as he crosses the United States by train. “Mama has two phone numbers. We do not talk about immigration on her Obama phone. For that we use the other number with no data plan.” The linear train ride moving from Los Angeles to New York diverges into unruly directions of consciousness. A multiplicity of voices share thoughts, dreams and histories evoking images far away from the enclosed spaces of this trains interior. While capturing these landscapes and interiors through his lens, the moving images evidently illustrate an undocumented subjectivity, a site of precarious movement, migration and fugitivism in the US.

100% Silk is an independent record label and taste-maker in the expanding and evolving world of electronic dance music. In June of 2012, four core acts from the label, LA Vampires, Ital, Magic Touch and Maria Minerva, embarked a lengthy group tour through the UK, Europe, and beyond. SILK is an expressionistic documentary that chronicles the performances, cultural environments, and global scenes through which the trip traveled. The motivating philosophies and emotions of the artists involved are visually articulated with seven fully staged dance sequences conceived and choreographed by Mecca Vazie Andrews and the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Company. SILK is a music documentary, live concert experience, essayistic travelogue and above all, dance film.

Shot on 16 mm and in color, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines.

The EDSA revolution brought an alt to a new form of experimental cinema that was emerging during the Marcos regime. This is a recovered excerpt from a video experiment by the almost unknown director Arturo Madlangbayan, as re-edited by Miko Revereza and Raya Martin.

Worn out tapes, glitches in revolt.

A superimposition of footage encompassing travel, architecture, and visual abstraction in which “distances are folded to touch the other side like a folded map.” Silent.

Experimental short.

I know damn well this video will be consumed on the basis of my otherness, and will further implicate my family for crime of being here, and will continue to bind me into the institutional characterization of a “filipino american artist”. I am exhausted of this performance.