No Data Plan (Miko Revereza, 2019)

(Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing about films that are screening at the True/False Festival, that screened at Rotterdam, or are coming up at Berlin. If you are curious as to which festival(s) a given film played in, check the tags at the bottom of the post.)

The last thing that experimental cinema needed was another train film. The connection between trains and the avant-garde has been well documented by the likes of Tom Gunning, Lynne Kirby, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and if you think about it, there are probably more experimentalists who have done train films than haven't. Some of the key films in this mini-genre include Ken Jacobs' The Georgetown Loop, James Benning's RR, Ernie Gehr's Eureka, and Gina Telaroli's Traveling Light. 

Filipino-American filmmaker Miko Revereza, who has studied at Bard, has added to this body of work with his new feature, No Data Plan, and against all odds, he brings something new to the table. This is a major film, although it takes some time to get accustomed to its rhythms. It creeps up on you. Shot over the course of a transcontinental Amtrak trip, No Data Plan uses the expansive space of the United States to ruminate about belonging, xenophobia, and family secrets. Along the way, Revereza not only trains his camera out the window onto the rolling landscape. He explores every possible nook of the train itself, resulting in a strangely Constructivist portrait of close quarters. 

This is, foremost, a film about negotiating interiors and exteriors, and this is threaded through its textual themes as well. As the film opens, Revereza explains the title via onscreen text. His mother has two phones, an "Obama phone" for general use, and one without a data plan, for discussing immigration issues. Early in the trip, a ticket taker asks to see a passenger's ID, and there is a question raised over when this became procedure. We know that at every stop on the journey, there could be an ICE raid, and innocent people could be hauled off the train.

This doesn't happen. Instead, we learn about Revereza's mother and an affair she has with a much younger man, to Miko's chagrin. We hear from other voices, including one person (Revereza himself? Not sure.) describing a dream in which he goes to Manila but cannot leave the airport. Anxiety about movement, work, and identity are laced throughout No Data Plan, and although the opening text signals that some sort of confrontation might occur, it never does. Like the train trip itself, it is steady and quotidian, with viewers needing to adjust our expectations to a different register of change. This mirrors the ever-present drone of unbelonging created by Trump and the rhetoric of anti-immigration. It's just the new landscape, something some people simply have to learn to live with. Like so much in our present moment, it's a crisis disguised as normalcy.