Screening of “Distancing” (2019) and “DROGA!” (2014), by artist Miko Revereza, followed by a discussion on the entanglement of cinema, migration, and the fugitive agency of ‘stateless’ cinema in the ruins of psychological and geographical chasms.

Distancing (16mm, 10min, Color, 2019)
Shot on 16mm colour film, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines. ‘My ticket is one way’, the filmmaker explains to his grandmother as she suddenly realizes he isn’t coming back. Distancing is a film about this personal realization; to leave and thus become exiled from the country where he was raised. The film acts as a memoir and cites a lineage of statelessness in cinema. It is a personal document of the moment anticipating a great departure.

DROGA! (Super 8, 8min, B&W, 2014)
A portrait of a Filipino family in America, DROGA! explores the American dream as a hallucination. It is a mediation on movement, disorientation and forgetting.

Miko Revereza
Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is a stateless filmmaker raised in California and currently residing between the Philippines and Mexico City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the US informs his relationship with moving images. DROGA! (2014), DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), No data plan (2018) and Distancing (2019) have screened at festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF Projections, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real and at institutions such as National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and Whitechapel Gallery. No Data Plan is recognized with Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Revereza is a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker and MFA graduate at Bard College.