“I never really identified with any places as home no matter how long I’ve lived in that place. When I was in the US, it wasn’t home — I wasn’t a legal resident. So then, on paper, bureaucratically, they didn’t allow me that home. But spiritually, the Philippines didn’t feel like home either. So I don’t know. I feel torn. The concept, the word home, it brings up complex emotions or attachments to it.”
Building upon his earlier work, Disintegration, 93-96, a poignant film essay concerning his family’s relocation from Manila to the US, Miko Revereza harnesses the immediate tools at hand — his camera, his smartphone, his itinerant life, and his unique purview as a stranger in a strange land — to construct this evocative meditation on home and homelands. Through static long shots and voice over narrations, Revereza records his physical and psychological journey from Los Angeles to NY aboard a cross-country train. The screen is confined to his point-of-view but this seeming restriction opens up a vast mental canvas for a rapid fire stream-of-consciousness that invite us in as confidantes and co-conspirators while in turn, keep us at a cautionary distance. In the spirit of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, this alienation effect emulates Revereza’s own as he reviews his own uncanny sense of rootlessness and rootedness as a new American and specifically, a Filipino-American. Over the course of his travelogue, we may question whether this qualifier — that proverbial hyphen — matters in this era of globalisation where we are so connected through screens that national and ethnic identities blur in the disembodied void of the digital? Revereza wants you to decide yourself based on your own experience negotiating both local and global spaces — whether roaring along on the rails, traipsing across airport terminals, or meandering along familiar city streets on foot. Ultimately, his own train of thought crescendos to a near halt when border patrol agents enter the picture and reverie lays waste to grim reality. (Lindy Leong)
