The 1997 inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao heralded the definitive reconversion of Bilbao's depressed, post-industrial landscape into a European cultural center and tourist hotspot. In the midst of Bilbao's civic beautification project, director Daniel Calparsoro released his first feature film, Leap into the Void (Salto al vaco), shot in the city's most impoverished community. The film's raw, gritty camera-work, coloured filters, and careful manipulation of waste and wreckage in the cinematic image render its story of urban decay tragically beautiful. Likewise, Frank Gehry's design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao now hailed as a marvel of postmodern architecture won the museum commission's approval precisely because it integrated and re-created the city's industrial ruins in a more gratifying spectacle of assymetrical metallic curves. This aesthetic of industrial ruins promoted by Bilbao's civic committee sheds light on the meaning and context of Leap into the Void. Conversely, a careful review of the film will come to question the ideological implications of Gehry's chic repackaging of the past.