Abstract: This talk explores the ways in which screen production extracts value from ruined urban locations.Ruin may connote a priceless location, as in ancient ruins, or a de-valued space with the potential of re-acquiring value, as in industrial ruins turning into art spaces. This ambiguity points to how spatial value may be established, erased and re-generated over time, a re-valuation process which, is explored in this study as both economic—initiated by screen productions, leading to speculation and eventually urban redevelopment projects—and socio-political—since it often opens the way to the dispossession. I examine how screen productions, ranging from music videos shot in a decrepit former factory in London to an auteur film made in a war-torn Syrian town, may generate value in ruined locations. Tracing the coinciding histories of screen production and urban decay the talk aims to illustrate that extraction of value from a location is connected to its destruction, the visual archiving of destruction and racial, ethnic or class dispossession of disadvantaged residents, squatters or former workers. I underline that not only the production processes of blockbuster films but even that of progressive works about refugee rights or human suffering during war, may harm or precaritize the very populations (refugees, war victims, residents of a lower income neighborhood) whose rights these films set out to promote.