The New Art of Making Ruins traces the reflections and thoughts of people living in Havana, who spend their days among buildings in ruin. An essay on the ambivalence of magic and decay, the documentary records the last moments of these buildings, before they are renovated - or just collapse.

Florian Borchmeyer has made a haunting and sumptuous documentary about the crumbling city of Havana. He shot on HD to get this look, as Andy Stout explains.

Ever since he was a student in the city in the 1990s, Florian Borchmeyer has wanted to document the ruins of Havana and the people that live in them as the city slowly crumbles around them.

“It’s not only about ruined architecture, but also the circumstances of people having to live in places which, in a European country, would not be considered inhabitable,” he explains. “For example, there is someone living in the ruins of a collapsed theatre, there are people who live in 19th century palaces which are becoming more and more damaged, there are houses where the furniture hasn’t changed in 50 years.” The result is Habana — Arte Nuevo De Hacer Ruinas (Havana – the New Art of Making Ruins), a 90-minute feature which got its theatrical release in Germany at the end of March. It was shot on HDCAM using an HDW-750P, and Borchmeyer lists a whole range of reasons why the format was a good choice, starting with the very real difficulties of shooting a film in modern day Cuba. “In Cuba it is not really possible to do a 35mm production without the participation of the government,” he explains. “We would have had to do a project with the Cuban Film Institute which also meant that they would have read all the shooting scripts, watched all that we were doing, and we would have had to shoot the film with their cameras, their assistants, and with their lights and sound people. So, instead, we declared to them that we were doing TV reporting and to anyone who is not an expert, a Digital Betacam camcorder and an HDCAM camcorder look very similar.” Shooting on HD also helped keep the size of the production crew down to a fairly frugal eight people. All the same, it was hardly a clandestine production, Borchmeyer’s team had to ship a tonne of equipment over all in all, including an entire case of German sausage for food emergencies.

Cinemagraphic look

The film was shot using Digi prime lenses. “We had zoom lenses with us but we tried to shoot as much as possible with the fixed lenses as it gives a really cinemagraphic and fictional film look to the production,” says Borchmeyer. He is extremely pleased with the quality of the print that has resulted, especially as the feature has had a simultaneous 35mm and digital release in Germany, thanks to the increasing number of arthouse cinemas adopting HD projection. “We did everything from an HD master,” he says. “It costs something in the region of 2000 Euros to encode it, but afterwards you can get digital copies for a very low price.” Ultimately though, the advantages of HD mastering mean nothing if the final results don’t measure up on screen. And fortunately for Borchmeyer, the elegant ruins of Havana crumbling back into the Cuban soil from whence they sprung look both haunting and sumptuous in their decay.

“I’m the director, I’m not the cameraman or a technician but when I saw the result, I really liked it,” he says. “Cuba is a country with very extreme light differences, when you’re in an interior it’s very dark because there isn’t much sunlight and you don’t necessarily have an opportunity for artificial lighting, and then outside it was tropical sunshine. It’s not easy to handle but we were really impressed at the end by just how good it looks. “We tried to work without contrasts and then do the contrast in post production, rather than during the shooting. The result is really impressive. Also, if you do long interviews on camera, and we did, if you do it on 35mm it’s an immense cost but the tapes for the HDCAM are much more economical.” You just have to carry them all over there in the first place... 7 May 2007

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Havana.El Arte Nuevo de Hacer Ruinas (2006),

Directors: Florian Borchmeyer, Matthias Hentschler,Producers: Matthias Hentschler, Florian Borchmeyer Screenwriter: Florian Borchmeyer, Director of Photography: Tanja Trentmann, Editor: Birgit Mild, Sound: Frank Schreiner Cast: Antonio José Ponte, Nicanor del Campo, Reinaldo Lottis

Film Language: Spanish, Subtitles: English, Film Year: 2006, Run Time: 86 min