This month's Light and Sound Machine will feature Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare. The screening will take place at Third Man Records' Blue Room on Thursday, June 20 at 7 pm sharp. Tickets are $10, available in advance or beginning at 6 pm at the will-call desk. Tickets are available for $8 for Belcourt members via the Belcourt website. All tickets, both member and non-member, will be available starting at 6 pm on Thursday at the will-call desk at the door. Posters designed by Jay Shaw will also be available for sale on the night of the exhibition. Hope to see Vault members come out!

PERFUMED NIGHTMARE, d. Kidlat Tahimik - Philippines, 1977, 93min, 16mm

Perhaps cinema’s most humorous and poignant essay on the cultural chasm between the First and Third Worlds, PERFUMED NIGHTMARE is the quasi-autobiographical account of an acute case of cultural dementia. Kidlat Tahimik, the Philipino-born, American-educated, German-based filmmaker and global citizen casts himself as Kidlat Tahimik, the primitive naif with an awe-struck enchantment with the wonders of the developed world. The semi fictional Tahimik is a taxi (or “jeepney”) driver by day who clutches his transistor radio by night, religiously tuned-in to Voice of America and forever dreaming of the heavens - he’s the president of a fan club for Werner von Braun, the defected Nazi rocket scientist who pioneered the American space program. His filmic diary is a collage of village anecdotes and imagery, presented with varying degrees of ethnographic exoticism and short wave radio chatter. However, his document is interrupted by the appearance of a comically sinister American businessman, offering Tahimik a new life in France, refilling his company’s gumball machines which conspicuously adorn the Parisian city streets. It is here that Perfumed Nightmare evokes a turn towards magical realism, and the illusion-shattering truths of the technology age transform Tahimik into something new - a once “sleeping typhoon”, now awakened and poised to literally blow away the symbols of Western domination, and himself back to his homeland.