ACF Asian Cinema Fund

Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund

2024 Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund

LIST Sorry for the late reply
Category Asian Project
Project Sorry for the late reply
Director Miko REVEREZA
Country Philippines / Mexico
Director's Profile Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning filmmaker. His documentaries, Droga! (2014), Disintegration 93-96 (2017), No Data Plan (2019) and Distancing (2019) have screened widely at international festivals including Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Projections and Film at Lincoln Center′s Art of the Real at New York Film Festival. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Whitechapel Gallery, the National Museum of Singapore, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He was listed as one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema by Filmmaker Magazine 2018, is winner of the Art Doc Award at Sheffield International Documentary Festival 2019, is a Flaherty Film Seminar artist 2019, and an MFA graduate from Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His critically acclaimed debut feature documentary, No Data Plan (2019), was recognized by the British Film Institute, Hyperallergic, and CNN Philippines, as one of the best films of 2019. Revereza is also a recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking 2021.
Synopsis
Sorry for the late reply is a film about an artist couple documenting each other in their domestic space. Carolina is a painter and Miko an experimental filmmaker. They meet in Manila during an art triennial, and then start a life together in Mexico during the pandemic. They go back and forth between the two countries, experiencing a sense of parallel worlds and familiar landscapes; the consequence of their colonial histories and violent neoliberalization. The film depicts their cultural labor, their political discourse, their care for each other, as they learn to live outside of the metropolitan centers. It functions as a diary of personal and creative growth, a memoir contextualizing their pasts and a sketchbook for learning from the landscape. Over this period, the soundscape of birds and insects changes and so does the plant life. Likewise, ideas emerge and transform or disappear. Through the intimate and the banal of their everyday rhythm and routine, they navigate the conflicts of being attached to global modes of production, and the creative and economic hardships within their practices, while shaping an idealized life together in the countryside.
Director's Note
I am interested in the banal intimacy that a home movie depicts. Moments easily forgotten, objects in transition and minute changes in landscape. Like Chantal Akerman, we build a home movie out of a “No Home” situation. Carolina and I grow together as exiles of places that are difficult to return to, bureaucratically, economically, and emotionally, the Philippines, Argentina, and the United States. We live in Mexico. Manila is where we met. We continually return to this place through memory, retracing our romance to a small town called Binmaley.
I am interested in how cinema can blur geographies. The film jumps between countries, between the current moment and the past, proceeds through fragments, deviations, distractions, and fixations. It meditates on the processes of film and art, from imagination to the administration between power structures and precarious economies. Questions arise around the sustainability of our practices, how to hold onto our personal agency and how to care for each other′s complicated needs as artists. I have always believed that a documentary does not need to be anything more than the reality that exists in our direct and personal surroundings. Furthermore, I agree with the sentiment proclaimed by Nina Simone, that an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.
Still Cut
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