Miko Revereza — Nothing to Declare

Blurred and overexposed, these images are mainly of airports: liminal spaces and duty-free. The eye squints as travellers streak from one edge of the frame to the other.

But where is the maker of this film, titled Nothing to Declare? Imagining the film’s frame as a legal border he cannot enter, he moves around the image’s contours, on the other side of visibility. He stows himself between images, smuggling himself across as though the film were luggage. Imagination becomes a form of refusal, and he runs with it. The frame is also a balikbayan, a word in Tagalog that names both a box of goods sent to the Philippines and a person who returns there. The filmmaker is a balikbayan. This accumulation of metaphors is employed as an interarticulation, and as a decoy: a means to circumvent the system.

In effect, the film is a stop-motion animation. It is built from photographs taken in burst mode, in which a single click produces several images in pursuit of a subject. Each frame’s stillness strains against the magic of being set in motion. “Stop” also takes on significance when considering Revereza’s experience of being legally undocumented and the prohibitory infrastructures that limit his movement.