Nowhere Near

Nowhere Near follows the authors psychogeographic journey from Los Angeles to Pangasinan to Mexico City after his departure from the United States, where he lived undocumented for twenty-six years. Returning to the Philippines with his grandmother to search for lost land and to confront a family curse, Revereza surfaces legacies of Spanish colonialism and US imperialism as they bear out in its continued present. Through film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative, Nowhere Near excavates the amnesias and silences that shape personal and historical memory in the exilic, diasporic impasse. Miko Revereza's Nowhere Near is the 2021 Open Reading Period Book Prize winner, and was selected by guest judge John Keene. Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 9396 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFIs Sight & Sound Magazines 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergics Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comments Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazines New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, London. Praise In his powerful and entrancing voice, fueled by irony and critique, Miko Revereza explores neoliberal capitalism, the challenges facing undocumented families, the non-existent American dream, and internal and external exile, showing how borders of all kinds (geographical, racial, psychic), though regularly traversed, are policed and criminalized. Nowhere Near is a cri de coeur about twenty-first-century American society. John Keene Miko Reverezas captivating book is a companion to his diaristic 2023 feature of the same title, and it is a pleasure to encounter on the page the resonant literary voice he developed while making that film. Befitting its rich entwining of personal and political histories, Nowhere Near contains a wondrous range of modes and moods: raw and revea