Distancing
Shot on 16mm colour film, Distancing documents the logistics and poetics of Miko Revereza’s decision to leave the United States and return to the Philippines. ‘My ticket is one way’, the filmmaker explains to his grandmother as she suddenly realizes he isn’t coming back. Distancing is a film about this personal realization; to leave and thus become exiled from the country where he was raised. The film acts as a memoir and cites a lineage of statelessness in cinema. It is a personal document of the moment anticipating a great departure. —Miko Revereza
Dear Babylon
The final of the trilogy, Dear Babylon begins with the introduction of the fictional “AC30 Housing Bill”, which states that London tenants renting from a housing association must pay a flat fee of £18,000 to their landlords to continue their tenancy.
Meeting Uncle Yuji
The director, a former insurance man in Tokyo, took a chance to build a new life as an artist in Norway. He recalls a vague childhood memory of his Uncle Yuji, the Tokyo hippie who left for New York to play salsa in Spanish Harlem in the late 70’s. This film presents his first meeting with Yuji in his New York apartment in 2015, and the life of a solitary artist who, for the past 40 years, has chosen to not perform for an audience. Mixed emotions of initial admiration and the realisation of what it means to live as an artist through a lifetime is presented both in the story of Yuji’s life and through the making of the film itself. —Daisuke Kosugi
Receiver
A crossed telephone line propels Receiver into a suite of heated and intimate conversations in which we encounter scenes of protest at a university for D/deaf students, Q&A cross-fire interrogation, vocal confrontations and lip-reading practice. In its various moods the film presents a heady and multi-layered assemblage of Deaf histories, drawing on research into The Milan Conference of 1880 which led to a ban on teaching sign language in schools for deaf people. Receiver considers how we both speak and listen, and the question of who has the right and capacity to be heard. —Jenny Brady
Receiver is fully captioned for D/deaf and hard of hearing audiences