Left In Ruins

Experimental Short Film (Italy / 2016)

A story about a man who is lost in his mind, in his hopes and fears. He walks through life believing to be alone. But maybe he is alone if he only sees himself.

This short film was quite an interesting and challenging project for me. During my one year stay in Tianjin, China, (around the same time I created my experimental short film “Born In Captivity”) I was composing a lot of musical scores on my computer. At the time, I hadn’t yet decided how I would eventually make use of those compositions – I simply enjoyed being creative. While writing the piece that would one day lay the foundation for “Left In Ruins”, I already had vivid ideas about a dystopian short film based in China. Considering the circumstances, however, and the fact that I had no equipment that would have allowed me to realize this project, I decided to simply focus on the music and create a short film once I was back in Europe.

To understand “Left In Ruins”, it is helpful to know that the music is the real core of the project. The images and the story can be regarded as merely supportive material carrying the atmosphere, without being the actual focus of the short film. I always considered “Left In Ruins” to be some kind of music video, made to process and showcase my mindset during my stay in China.

The “actor” in the video is a friend of mine, who was also my flat mate in Tianjin. He was present when I wrote the music and it seemed fitting to complete this project together. Like many of my personal projects, this short film was also completely no-budget, created simply for the joy of creation and meant as a visible container to preserve a part of myself from that time.

A man repairs a broken mirror. Image taken from the short film "Left In Ruins" by Tiemo Weidemann

A frame taken from the short film

Additional Material

I particularly had a lot of fun creating all the visual effects for this project, as visual effects were the reason I became interested in filmmaking when I was 14. I am by no means a visual effects artist, but I was still proud of what I was able to do on my computer and, for that reason, created a small “breakdown video” to document all the efforts that went into this video. Fittingly, the music for the “breakdown video” is also one of the musical compositions I wrote in China.