Manuel Embalse’s second feature film, Las ruinas nuevas (The New Ruins), presents itself as a visual and sonic essay that transforms the experience of looking at electronic waste into an archaeological journey of the present. Far from being a mere record of discarded objects, the film proposes a sensitive and political reading of our relationship with technology, memory, and labor. Embalse turns cables, keyboards, monitors, and disks into vestiges of an era that, though still alive, already accumulates ruins. From its first images, the film captivates with the paradox of showing the everyday as if it were a millennial discovery. The technological remnants—motherboards, shattered cell phones, fragments of CPUs—appear on screen like museum pieces, accompanied by an editing rhythm that oscillates between contemplative pauses and vibrant pulses. The experience is immersive: as the viewer observes, they also feel the urgency of reflecting on the speed with which these same devices were replaced.

Embalse positions himself as an archaeologist of his own time. For over a decade he collected images of electronic waste in Buenos Aires, Río Turbio, and Lima, building an archive that became the foundation for this film essay. What at first seems like a personal gesture—saving technological remains as if they were treasures—unfolds into a political gaze: to show that we live surrounded by programmed waste, products born with an expiration date in the name of endless consumption. The film reminds us that obsolescence is not an accident but a market strategy. Every discarded object reveals the fragility of a system that turns innovation into instant trash. What seems indispensable today will tomorrow be nothing more than an obstacle on the sidewalk. That frenzied rhythm, one we barely notice in our daily lives, is laid bare with images that oscillate between the beautiful and the unsettling.

Yet The New Ruins does not remain in the mere contemplation of debris. The film opens a space for the memory of the workers who sustain the technological cycle. Among them emerges Xu Lizhi, a young worker-poet from Foxconn’s factory in China, who left behind a painful testimony of exploitation and solitude before his death. His verses, which resonate throughout the film, act as an intimate counterpoint to emptied industrial landscapes. With this inclusion, Embalse expands the horizon of the work: it is no longer only about what we discard, but about the invisible lives behind each device. Archaeology turns into anthropology. The filmmaker does not reduce Xu Lizhi to a tragic symbol; he presents him as a voice that illuminates the hidden side of progress. In this way, the film connects the material with the human, the industrial with the poetic.

Despite its melancholic tone, The New Ruins also carves out space for playfulness. Embalse toys with musical montage and surprises with moments verging on the absurd, such as an animated sequence where satellites become dancers in an unexpected musical number. These interventions are disorienting, yet rather than weakening the film, they add lightness to a narrative that could easily have collapsed under solemnity. The inclusion of everyday sounds, such as the meows of his cat, serves as a reminder of the organic in the midst of technological scrap. That fragile presence contrasts with the hardness of metal and plastic, reminding us that memory also shelters small, irretrievable, living affections.

Embalse’s approach dialogues with a tradition of essay cinema that explores the intersection of politics and aesthetics. The film does not seek to preach or to provide immediate solutions; instead, it invites the viewer to observe attentively, to be challenged by the repetitive images that reveal the scale of the problem. The visual redundancy of cables and broken screens is not a flaw but part of the strategy: to transmit the feeling that waste surrounds us, inevitable and infinite. At this point, the film becomes a critique of “capitalist realism,” the belief that there is no alternative to the current system. Showing mountains of electronic remains is an act of resistance, a way of making visible what we would rather ignore. And in that act of revelation lies its political force.

What is remarkable about The New Ruins is that, despite everything, it does not succumb to defeatism. The film finds in memory, poetry, and collective organization a possible path forward. The final sequence, with its graphic play using floppy disks to form words in Spanish, works as a call to action. It is true that the resource may feel explicit, but it proves effective because it condenses all the accumulated energy of the film: anger, tenderness, and the need to imagine another way of inhabiting technology. Its aesthetic proposal combines the immediacy of the music video with pauses that allow space for reflection. In this way, the film does not stop at denunciation; it builds a sensory experience that oscillates between fascination and discomfort. Embalse invites us to think from the ruins, but also to organize ourselves within them.