Kidlat Tahimik is the nom de cinéma of Eric de Guia; it means "quiet lightning," which is what Tahimik proved himself to be with his first feature, The Perfumed Nightmare. Tahimik again created in Turumba a sardonic picture of the growing Western influence on village life in the Philippines. The story is seen through the eyes of a young boy whose family makes papier-maché figures to sell at the village's annual Turumba festival. When these painstakingly created dolls are discovered by a German department story buyer, the effects of creeping capitalism begin to be felt in the family; by the time his order for 25,000 mascots for the Munich Olympics has been filled, the whole village has gone high-tech. "Like Perfumed Nightmare, Turumba makes canny use of the accidental and the available, turning junk-littered reality into art the same way that the Filipinos turn the detritus of industrialism into handicrafts...Turumba's style is ingenuous (but) the film's vision of the conflicts inherent in progress on Western and capitalist terms is anything but innocent" (Pat Aufderheide, The Reader, Chicago).