With Kidlat Tahimik, whose name in Tagalog means “quiet lightning,” the films and the filmmaker are one. He has continually invented himself through his cinema, and so his cinema is as singular as the man. Born as Eric de Guia in 1942 in the American-fashioned Baguio City, north of Luzon, he received his MBA from Wharton and worked as an economist in France before stumbling upon a 16mm Bolex in Germany. In an act of defiance that recalled the Filipino revolutionaries’ tearing of their cédulas in 1896 to declare independence from Spain, he tore his diploma in 1972 to become an artist and to rediscover his roots. Before embarking on his own career, Kidlat was instrumental in making Lino Brocka’s You Were Weighed and Found Wanting (1974) possibly by introducing the director to small-stake investors. Kidlat has since then epitomized the possibilities of alternative filmmaking and the artisanal mode of production. In 1974, he was cast in Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kasper Hauser (1974) as a village chief who plays his nose-flute to keep his tribe alive. The role prefigured the persona that he would assume and exceed in the coming years.
