New Directors: Ian Ruschel

Ian Ruschel’s two-minute film for the Creative Club of São Paulo Festival depicts every creative’s worst nightmare. Powered by an ominous voiceover, the film imagines a post-apocalyptic world where humanity has succumbed to ‘bovinisation’, with cattle-like humans devoid of individual feeling and thought. Creativity has been sucked dry, and through Ruschel’s fast-paced imagery we see a dark and disturbing world that is self-destructing. Finishing with a call for viewers to ‘unbovine’ themselves, it’s a dramatic and thoroughly engrossing piece of film, and one that is gaining the director some deserved attention.

Created in collaboration with Borghi/Lowe São Paulo, Ruschel was given creative reign by the agency and spent three weeks fleshing out his treatment. For the cinematography he turned to iconic films such as Se7en and Fight Club, while for the art direction he used movies including 12 Monkeys, The Road and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as inspiration. But once the visuals were ironed out, the biggest challenge came in trying to achieve Ruschel’s high-scale vision on a low-end budget. As well as recruiting a cast of friends to fill the roles, the production team begged and borrowed as much equipment and expertise as they could. “We had no time or money for much improvisation,” says the director. “Of course we could improvise a bit, but pretty much everything you see had already been established. We knew that we would need to find two or three locations where we could run all the scenes from the film. At the last minute our location manager found an abandoned factory where we shot 80 per cent of the scenes. And as it was going to be demolished, we had the freedom to leave it as we wished. So we broke glass, destroyed furniture, set things on fire and smashed toilets, without having to pay for the repairs! We were very lucky. If we had not found such an ideal place, I do not think we would have managed to shoot the film in two days.”

Signed to Stink in São Paulo, Ruschel always knew that he wanted a career in moving images. After studying film at university, he enrolled for several film courses in New York before returning home and earning his chops as an assistant and freelance editor. His transition to directing came when he bought his own 5D camera, and with professional representation he’s now keen to get his teeth into the commercials as well as the promo world and, in the long term, feature films. And if the quality of this piece is anything to go by, there’s no risk of Ruschel falling victim to bovinisation along the way.