Perfumed Nightmare

“One of the year’s ten best films.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice “There’s nothing even remotely nightmarish about ‘Perfumed Nightmare.’ It’s an enchanting and poignant experience, a totally original seriocomic creation with an infectious and exuberant energy. The film is a semi-autobiographical fable by a young Philippino named Kidlat Tahimik, about his awakening to, and reaction against, American cultural colonialism. Born in 1942 during the Occupation, Kidlat spent ‘the next 33 typhoon seasons in a cocoon of American dreams.’ This, then, is his perfumed nightmare: the lotus land of American technological promise. “In his primitive village he worships the heroism of the Machine, the sleek beauty of rockets, the efficiency of industrialism. He’s the president of his own Werner Van Braun fan club. He longs to visit Cape Canaveral, to experience those shimmering wonders he knows from the movies, from soldiers, from The Voice of America. This is a bizarre, hallucinatory movie full of dazzling images, and outlandish ideas. It’s both real and surreal, poetic and political, naive and wise, primitive and supremely accomplished. Tahimik is a master of metaphor. There’s the metaphor of the bridge that connects his past, present and future with the great world beyond. And there’s the metaphor of the film itself: produced single-handedly for $10,000, it is a triumph of cottage industry, a dazzling testament to the liberty of the imagination. With his very first film, Kidlat Tahimik has introduced a classic.” – Gene Youngblood, Los Angeles Filmex Program