Four minutes in a curing barn, from the first grey light to the moment the sun comes through the slats. Nothing moves except the leaf, and it moves very slowly.
A curing barn in Cagayan is a long shed of bamboo with a roof of nipa palm. The walls let the air through and keep the rain out, which is the whole point. Inside, the leaf hangs in pairs on poles, a thousand pairs to a bay, and it stays there for forty days if the wind cooperates and sixty if it does not. The barn keeper counts the days on a board by the door.
We set two cameras at the far end at half past four and left. This film is what they saw. Green turning to yellow, yellow turning to the brown of an old saddle. Sound from the barn itself: wind, a rooster two fields over, the rustle when a gust gets in under the eaves.
Curing, then fermentation: what is happening in there
Air curing is the slow way to dry a leaf. The sugars in the leaf break down, the chlorophyll goes, and what is left is the raw material for the pilón, where fermentation will do the rest. Hurry it and the leaf turns green and bitter. Let it go too long and it turns to paper. Marites, who keeps this barn, judges it by touch, by the way the stem bends in the morning damp.
“Forty days if the wind is right. Sixty if it is not. The leaf decides, we watch.”Marites · barn keeper · Cagayan
We made this film for the people who will sell the cigar, so that they can say what happens before the bench and be right. It is on the partner portal in a 16:9 and a 9:16 version. It also turns out to be a good thing to watch with the sound up at the end of a day.
