World cinema is often considered to be an inadequately political category, coopted by the capitalist and neocolonial flows of the international film festival circuit and transnational funding structures. This talk aims to open up a different line of historical influence by considering the inheritances of Third Cinema in contemporary formations of world cinema. In a key moment in film theory’s history, Fredric Jameson read Kidlat Tahimik’s anti-imperialist classic Perfumed Nightmare (1977) as exemplary of the failure of Third Cinema’s liberatory project and the inauguration of a globalised capitalist aesthetic. In returning to this critical history thirty years on, different questions emerge. Critical debate on the film delineates a colonial geopolitics of knowledge but it also opens spaces to contest this epistemology. Kidlat’s indigenous critique of destructive modernisation points to the film theoretical potential of animism, a precolonial worldview that offers a different framework for understanding the aesthetics and politics of cinematic space, time, and visuality. How might we rethink animism as a theoretically significant and politically resistant form? By proposing animism as a Southeast Asian mode of cinematic worlding, this talk seeks to complicate both Eurocentric film theories and critical debates on the politics of cinema’s global flows.