Optical Track is EPFC’s weekly cinematic radio show on dublab.com! Join us Tuesday September 28, 8 – 10 pm for AIR on the Air Episode 22 with LA AIR 2014 artists in residence Miko Revereza followed by a rockin’ set of tunes from the Philippines by EPFC’s own DJ Wilvis.

Can’t tune in for the live broadcast? Shows are archived at https://www.dublab.com/shows/optical-track.

AIR on the Air is supported by The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.

Miko Revereza: “How does an undocumented documentary filmmaker document themself?”

It’s really feeling like spring these days at EPFC North… pretty little plants are poking their way through the soil in the garden, the birds are singing and building new houses in the trees, and the sun and the clouds are playing tag way up in the blue sky. Come on by the Fieldhouse this weekend–March 14 and 15– to make a little 16mm movie about the beauty of this fleeting time, explore the zen beauty of Direct Animation  and welcome a dear friend for a first-time visit to Vancouver! All events are FREE and ALL-AGES!

Workshop: Intro to 16mm
Saturday, March 14
1 pm – 5 pm
Spend some time with a Bolex Camera and see the world in a whole new way. Free event! Everyone welcome!

Workshop: Let’s Animate, Part 1
Sunday, March 15
1 pm – 5 pm
Join us for Part 1 of a very special Direct Animation workshop with visiting artist, wonderful friend and fabulous filmmaker Miko Revereza. Free event! Everyone welcome!

Screening: Dinner and a Movie with visiting artist Miko Revereza
Sunday, March 15
5 – 7 pm
Tasty images. Tasty food. Tonight’s edition features the work of visiting artist Miko Revereza. Free event! Everyone welcome! 

EPFC is proud to be a Community Partner in the presentation of Miko Revereza’s No Data Plan as part of the 35th Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. A beloved member of the Echo Park Film Center family, Miko’s powerful new experimental documentary screens at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles at 5 pm on Sunday, May 5.

More information and tickets here.

Named as one of 2018’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film to Watch,” director Miko Revereza challenges formal conventions of filmmaking while amplifying the voices of the underrepresented. Building upon his earlier work, Disintegration, 93-96, a poignant film essay concerning his family’s relocation from Manila to the US, 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 confidentes 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 review 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 – matter in this era of globalization 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, to 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 lay waste to grim reality. —Lindy Leong

Co-presented with Community Partners: Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance | Los Angeles (APALA-LA), Echo Park Film Center