In both its form and content, Perfumed Nightmare takes the opposite stance to mainstream Western, if not to say Hollywoodian, cinema. This first-time film from the young Filipino Eric Oteyza de Guia, born in 1942, is more than a film: by re-inventing himself as Kidlat Tahimik, the self-taught filmmaker opens up other possible cinematographic avenues with grace and humour. He shakes up the ethnographic genre and questions the Western domination of his country with feigned but effective candour. Even anticolonial discourse is formulated anew in this disenchanted tale set in Kidlat’s village near Manila, where he dreams of building bridges up to the Moon and discovers the other face of the Western world on a trip to Paris.
Anne Kerlan
