Auteur/autrice : gisellesbooks

Miko Revereza (b. 1988, Manila, Philippines) is an award-winning experimental filmmaker raised in California and currently residing in Oaxaca City. His upbringing as an undocumented immigrant and current exile from the United States informs his relationship to moving images. He has made a series of personal documentaries informed by his experiences with migration and exile: DROGA! (2014), Disintegration 93 – 96 (2017), No Data Plan (2018), Distancing (2019), El Lado Quieto (2021), and Nowhere Near (2023). These works have been screened at festivals and institutions such as Locarno, TIFF, NYFF, and MoMA. No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, and was listed in BFI’s Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019, and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2019. Nowhere Near (recipient of Hubert Bals Fund) was among Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2023 and CNN Philippines’ Best Filipino Films of 2023. Revereza was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s New Faces of Independent Cinema, is a Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and is a recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaker. He holds an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His films are distributed by LUX, London.

A screening of Redistribution (2007-2026), organised on the occasion of the release of Dédié à la vie, Singing Books, 2025.

Dédié à la vie, originally conceived as a young adult novel, gradually evolved during the writing process into a hybrid collection. It immerses the reader in the author’s most intimate reflections as he confronts a world in flux. Bringing together texts written between 2001 and 2019, the work provides insight into the thoughts that drove him during this period, often resonating directly with the works he had already—or was about to—produce.

Journals, poems, and internal dialogues merge in a psychedelic waltz, while lucidly addressing the violence inherent in certain cultural mechanisms, which are often submerged in « the ordinary. » Despite its sarcastic humor, Dédié à la vie does not speak with a cynical voice; on the contrary, it offers a tribute to resilience and an acceptance of the world in its most elusive aspects.

Translated from English to French by Paolo Viscogliosi and Joseph Kraft.
Published by Singing Books, 2025.

Thanks to Sadie Coles HQ and the artist.

“Erudite poetry emerges from the darkness of dreams. Redhead’s debut is where « letters go blind » —a penumbral precision, a lyric register built like a bothy: austere yet lit with conscience. Sensibility is awake here, embodied in verse both elemental and exact. There are flax-field passions and city cowsheds; a rural roughness meeting a busy sidewalk fag-end. It is poetry that roams the earth as it remembers the mind.”
— Eleanor Tennyson

“It takes a particular kind of poet to come up with “someone was handing out relief to all / but it’s blame-poisoned / as soon as you touch it it’s your fault”. And yet reading Ben Redhead’s pamphlet involves the quick realization that you have stumbled upon this illusive- whispered-about-poet. Burden’s tactical aftermath (to touch is to be burdened) are the points of drama in these poems I found myself most moved by; the betrayals of “real real real” so sharp. The reoccurring lexical instabilities, suffused with starving horses and so much love – not just relational love but love for Palestine, love to abolish the police –come together so well in these beautiful, strange little poems. Ah, you think towards the end of the pamphlet, I hear the moan with which the world rebirths itself.” 
— Leo Bussi