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Mababangong Bangungot
English Title: Perfumed Nightmare
Additional Language: English
Year of Release: 1977
Director & Screenwriter: Kidlat Tahimik
Producer: Kidlat-Kulog Productions
Cast: Kidlat Tahimik, Mang Fely, Dolores Santamaria, Georgette Baudry, Katarina, Hartmut Lerch
Kidlat takes his jeepney out of his rural hometown to go on a trip to Cape Canaveral in America and meet his idol, rocket scientist (and former Nazi official) Wernher von Braun. But he ends up in France and Germany, where the modernized surroundings initially leave him in awe. However, the longer his journey takes, the more he realizes that the modernization he admires comes at a price.
The only case in this list of a famous Philippine film virtually unknown in its own country of origin is the exception that proves the rule. Mababangong Bangungot has been taken to heart by a number of foreign observers. These included the Berlin International Film Festival (which gave it critics’ prizes) to Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studio (which distributed it in the US), as well as a handful of prestigious commentators including Fredric Jameson and J. Hoberman, who commended it for its complex yet playful portrayal of postcolonial dreams and realities in the Third World. In this respect Mababangong Bangungot was more than just ahead of its time: it represents independent cinema’s less-traveled road, its foreign triumph mimicked by latter-day local aspirants to Kidlat Tahimik’s stature. Unfortunately its populist sentiments and gentle humor are regularly displaced, in today’s typical indie output, by academically esteemed alienating devices such as long and deliberately uninvolving takes, oblique lines of dialogue, obscure class-entrenched issues that often mask conventional approaches—and consequently the wholesale rejection of the native audience’s values and preferences.
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