This poignant video memoir documents how a Filipino filmmaker living illegally in America travels across the country by train to visit his mother. The surveillance camera's perspective is a logical consequence of the vulnerable position the filmmaker has been in for almost his entire life.
Director Miko Riveraza, who lives in America but is originally from the Philippines, documents the film. There is no plan for history. His train journey from Los Angeles to New York is as necessary as it is risky. In doing so, Riveraza, who lives illegally in the United States, puts his life at risk: under Trump, illegal immigrants are at high risk of deportation.
His first feature film works in two visual tracks: through the subtitles – a completely independent textual element that does not refer to the spoken text or voiceover – we learn about the intimate family problems that led to Riveraza’s visit to his mother. The oppressive digital shots from the train car put the audience in his precarious position. Riveraza films without drawing unwanted attention to himself. This is how you get There is no plan for history. Ghostly quality, because the presence of the Riviera is always evident, and at the same time it must be as invisible as possible.
It places this powerful cinematic gesture in a long tradition of imaginary travelogues or panoramic films, silent films from the pre-narrative era in which a camera mounted at the front of a train, for example, surveys the tracks and passing landscapes. Such films are driven by an imperialist and colonialist impulse to show environments and landscapes that the film audience would otherwise not be able to see. Riveraza undermines this mechanism: by filming a landscape that it is not allowed to be a part of, it comments on the privileged position in which many of the film’s viewers find themselves.
IFFR Unleashed also presents the film as a double bill with the film selected by Revereza. AKA without reward (1995) by Sukli “Don Bonus” Ni and Spencer Nakasako, an equally raw video diary of a Cambodian teenager documenting his final year of school before graduation. In a moving essay written for IFFR about AKA without reward “We lived in America, but its systemic borders still tried to exclude us,” Riveraza describes the ideas this source of inspiration gave him.
