A Moment When I Forgot My Home: A Conversation with Miko Revereza

I had different reasons for doing this throughout the film. In that first scene, this train conductor was looking at the tickets and asking for IDs, so I had to put the camera down somewhere, on my lap or on my leg or at the back of the seat. But I just kept rolling, which created a black frame.

So sometimes the black frames are not leader but the result of the camera looking into a dark place or at something too close to the lens to be registered. But sometimes I do add leader for an intentional cut to black. I like to think of those parts not as a bridge but as a pause or a line break in a poem. It’s like closing your eyes on the train and going in and out of consciousness. Especially in the moments before you encounter border patrol. I kept recreating moments of the train experience so that it wasn’t just a constant rush of images. There are moments when we close our eyes for a few minutes, and when we open them again, we notice we’re in a different place.

This is a camera maneuvered by a human being’s hands, and sometimes the hands need a break. Those hands and that body are precariously moving through this space. I played with different types of movement, and I tried to keep steadiness when I could. But there were moments when it was impossible for me to be stable, especially near the end, when the border patrol came. It was important for me to realize that the style of the camera movement is so connected to my body—my policed body—moving through the United States.

I have these binaural microphones. They’re super surround sound stereo; they both monitor and record from the point of the ears. They just look like earbuds. That brings down the sort of professional-camera-rig look. My moving kit gives me a tourist vibe [laughs]. After filming, I did a lot of sound design, especially foley, to bring out the sounds of the train.

It was very layered. At the time I was doing my MFA at Bard. They have these film bins: metal, industrial things that are nice to shake around and help get you some rattly sounds. And there are a lot of ACs around the building, so I would record different AC tones. On Amtrak, AC is probably the most prevalent sound, along with metal. On the train, I had this little AM/FM radio, and I found it interesting to record it as the train was moving, so I would play with that type of noise. Also, Bard has these really cool seventies analog synthesizers—an ARP 2600 and a Serge Modular. I wasn’t trying to make anything musical; I just wanted to produce some kind of alarm system, tiny notification sounds, ones that were factorylike.

I used most of the footage I had. The shooting/editing ratio was pretty high. I wasn’t actively shooting to make a film; I was making a diary, I suppose. Over the course of the trip I would get bored of shooting the same thing and want to switch it up. At some point in the middle, I didn’t know what to shoot. When I was looking at the same landscape for hours, I’d just shoot my hand or knee. You get to that point when you’re like, “Fuck it! It’s right there!” [Laughs.] The whole film is kind of like that, actually—okay, what else is there around here? What’s under the table? I filmed what’s outside of the window, and now I’m bored of that, so let’s film the window. Now let’s film the scratches on the window. You start to tune in to the texture of the train’s interior. It was cool to get to that point of boredom and keep looking for images to occupy myself.

There were a couple of long conversations that I shot but didn’t include. But they did kind of inform what I recreated later. In one of them, this person was talking about their weed vape pens for the longest time. Then I talked to this old white man with a USA cap who really pissed me off at first, because when I first came across him he said to me, “Welcome to America!” But at some point we sat down and had a conversation, and he just talked at length about Mennonites.

This is not the first time I took a train across the country. I also did it the previous year. On that trip, I had a lengthy, three-day conversation with someone who had just gotten out of state prison. The two of us had a really strong bond, and because of this I didn’t feel like documenting any conversations I had on the train or even interacting with people. People who ride the train have a lot of reasons for not flying instead. I overhear their stories, and a lot of them are heartbreaking.

Opening myself up to their stories would have required a lot more commitment to the subject. It would have been difficult to make a film in three days and properly commit to another person’s life story with care. So I stayed mostly introspective about my own story and family history.

There’s another moment like that—he says something like, “The minute we left we were always returning home. We are always returning home.” That resonated with me a lot, though for me it’s a bit more complicated. The moment I left the Philippines, I was always trying to return home, but there’s a flip side too. The minute I left the U.S., I was also always trying to return there.

Lately, John Smith. I’ve gotten into his Hotel Diaries [2001–7], which he recorded on a mini DV camcorder. It’s a home movie set in motel rooms that thinks about the post-9/11 world. It’s very funny, depressing, and witty—just very impressive. 

Independencia 86 was a collaboration with the filmmaker Raya Martin. It was a special feature on the DVD of his film Independencia [2009], which was a play on Philippine history that speculates on what a film created from the Filipino perspective in the thirties or forties would be like.

The project became this news-journalism kind of thing that goes through the history of Philippine cinema, including experimental cinema by the organization Mowelfund, which held workshops and inspired a generation of filmmakers. I didn’t have that much of a background in Philippine cinema before I worked on this film; Raya was schooling me on the history. All of my encounters with Filipino filmmakers since then, before I moved to the Philippines, were an active education. I think that scene in the Philippines inspired me to make films the way I do. After that, I’ve always felt connected to Philippine cinema, and they’ve kind of taken me in.

The occupation of the Philippines comes with the occupation of its media. There is a narrative that poses General Douglas MacArthur as the savior of the country; he is viewed as a national hero, a godlike figure, and there are statues of him everywhere. This serves as an advertisement of the U.S., to justify its occupation, and it has planted so many seeds deep into the hearts and minds of so many Filipinos, including my family. Of course that leads to a high volume of migration to the U.S. The film that I’m working on at the moment is trying to backtrack that migration. In LA, there’s MacArthur Park, and that’s where I got my fake ID to be able to work. There’s an interesting parallel between that park and the beach where MacArthur landed in my grandmother’s hometown.

It’s me recording myself trying to speak Tagalog, which I got much better at when I moved to the Philippines [laughs]. At that point, the process of coming up with a sentence would lead to a broken thought. I’m in Mexico now, and my Spanish is beyond tangled. Tagalog is similar in how there are so many loanwords from English and Spanish within it. That’s why I connect to the idea of the mangrove, whose roots are not grounded in soil. They’re coming out of the water and tangled into each other. That’s kind of my approach to filmmaking: accepting the tangle of the mangrove, navigating it, even making more knots. Not trying to disentangle it.

I think it’s the Jonas Mekas style: stream of consciousness. With a Bolex camera, you can film footage and then rewind and film over it. What happens to the intersection of images when they double-expose happens by chance. I’m inspired by playing things by ear.

There’s imperfection in any kind of image-making, including film. But digital imperfections are interesting because they become more apparent with time, once new technology takes over. That’s apparent in this footage that I’ve been filming for four or five years. People have these hierarchies of mediums: film grain is good; digital grain is bad. But I like digital grain. It’d be a different workflow if I was always working on film, and maybe film wouldn’t have allowed me to shoot as much as I did, and maybe No Data Plan wouldn’t be as much of a diary. I use a certain medium for what I need to do, what the job requires.

I had six 16 mm rolls to make Distancing. Man, that was tight. I had a budget of like ten rolls that I put aside for a music video, and then I shot that video in three rolls and saved the rest [laughs]. I shot on 16 because I had a supply of it. I knew the final result would have to be shot on this limited amount of film. That’s not to say digital is immaterial, because there are also costs there, especially up-front.

For No Data Plan, I shot long takes over three days on a train. It would have been difficult to keep that sense of anonymity and spontaneity with film. I touch on this in an essay I wrote called “Towards a Stateless Cinema”: the camera is baggage. When moving through spaces, you are responsible for this baggage and how it draws attention and scrutiny to you.

I have one film called Biometrics that’s a piece of direct animation on a 16 mm clear leader—it’s just my fingerprints on the leader. The concept is that it can’t be shown unless I’m present, and I won’t digitize it because those images are like my ID, you know? I wouldn’t want my fingerprints floating out there. The project was inspired by my experiences of going to immigration to get my fingerprints taken for DACA. I made the film in 2019, and I still observe these conditions for screening it. During the pandemic, last May, it was programmed for the Images Festival in Toronto. This was one of the first festivals that was transformed into an online festival. I wanted to screen this work in-person, but of course that was impossible; I was in Mexico with the can of film, and I wasn’t going to digitize it or send it over. So I just made a title card that explains the work to run for the length of time of the film. It won an award at the festival called the “More with Less Award.” It was cool to screen a PDF!