The work of experimental filmmaker Miko Revereza sets out to interrogate his personal history as an undocumented person who grew up in the USA — a so-called Dreamer. His new film Nowhere Near is a poetic essay film that traces his decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines. His journey to rediscover the country of his birth means leaving his family and becoming an exile from the country where he was raised and lived for 26 years.

Revereza’s spoken narration takes the form of a personal memoir that connects multiple locations. Diaristic fragments gathered in Los Angeles across many years and formats are interspersed with conversations with his mother that reveal the reality of what it means to be stateless. The second half of the film documents his return to Manila and the subsequent journey accompanying his grandmother to their ancestral village. Revereza finds himself an outsider here too as he is confronted by colonial legacies that operate across generations and borders. In his search to understand a family curse, connections are drawn between post 9/11 American immigration policy and the American and Spanish occupations of the Philippines.