Perfumed Nightmare

Kidlat Tahimik's 1977 film follows a young man who drives a jeepney in a small Philippine town and idolises the American space programme. Kidlat believes in Western progress; when he moves to Paris that belief comes apart, and what he sees there returns him to where he came from and to his own scale. Tahimik made the film almost single-handedly: writing, directing, editing, shooting part of it and playing the lead. The sixteen millimetre, loose, handmade texture is not incidental but part of the film's postcolonial argument. It screened in Berlin and won the FIPRESCI prize, and Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope handled its American release. It is regarded as a foundational text of Third Cinema and of Philippine independent film. Who it's for: viewers seeking experimental, personal and political cinema. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a well-made plot and technical polish; both are deliberately absent.