Sanaz Sohrabi's Film Reimagines OPEC's Political Promise

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Iranian Canadian artist and filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi's new film, An Incomplete Calendar, reinterprets the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The film, which thoughtfully uses archival footage and ephemera, casts the oil cartel as both a force for anti-imperialist solidarity and an unexpected channel for peace through cultural exchange.

The project received the best debut feature prize this past March at the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris and was screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival earlier this month. It is slated for numerous upcoming festival appearances. Sohrabi deviates from the typical talking-heads documentary format by incorporating poetic voiceovers, including her own, alongside contributions from writer and curator Murtaza Vali, scholar Laleh Khalili, journalist Layla Maghribi, and professor Leonardo Montaño Salas, among others, while centering archival materials visually.

Sohrabi initiated the project six years ago, conducting research and filming in Tehran, Cairo, Beirut, and Caracas. She stated,“Over the course of six years, I gathered the archives for this film while I was working on my trilogy about the colonial history of extraction in Iran and West Asia. I collected a repository of archives without realising I was piecing together remnants and fragments of the Third World's political calendar of independence and economic sovereignty. I layered rarely seen anticolonial magazines, stamps, newsreels and ephemera, found in flea markets, bookshops, online exchanges and mailed across continents, to shape the film's narrative and visual structure.”

The film chronicles a critical period in the 1950s when political decolonization enabled newly independent Asian and African nations to pursue economic sovereignty. Its timeline covers Pan-Arabism and the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Archival footage from British Petroleum illustrates both the optimism sparked by OPEC's establishment in Baghdad in 1960 and its eventual decline, marked by the Iran-Iraq war beginning in 1980, during which Ronald Reagan's administration provided funding to both sides.

A notable segment includes footage of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh's 1951 visit to Cairo, prior to his overthrow in a CIA-backed coup following the nationalization of the oil industry. Also featured is Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser after he nationalized the Suez Canal Company, a joint British-French venture. Despite later strained relations between Egypt and Iran after the Shah's rise, this mid-century period is recalled through a voiceover from an Egyptian woman describing her relative's pride in living on the newly designated Mossadegh Street in Cairo, serving as a reminder of rare Shia-Sunni unity amidst current conflicts in the region.

The film, inspired by Mona Damluji's 2017 book Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq, which examined BP films made in the region, offers a distinct cultural viewpoint. Sohrabi rediscovered a little-known 1980 vinyl recording, Rhymes and Songs for Opec, produced by the Central University of Venezuela's concert choir to commemorate OPEC's 20th anniversary. This recording becomes the film's starting point, revealing through interviews with former choir members that the choirmaster taught songs from various OPEC nations, including Algeria, Iraq and Oman, in Arabic dialects, Farsi, and Yoruba.

Scenes from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Kamran Diba under the patronage of Empress Farah and opened in 1977, provide poignant images of art and societal conditions before and after the 1979 revolution. An unearthed clip from the BP archive shows a Japanese artist creating a petroleum-based installation, featuring an oil fountain that combines Zen and Persian elements.

These images are contrasted with footage from the Aula Magna auditorium at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, a Unesco World Heritage site where Alexander Calder's 1953 commission, Floating Clouds, remains prominent. Here, Sohrabi appears reading Farsi poems to an empty auditorium, while an anonymous viewer reflects poetry into the suspended sculpture with a mirror. This image of cultural exchange amidst conflict is juxtaposed with footage of a cutout image of Iranian Oil Minister Mohammed Javad Tondguyan, who was captured and held hostage in Iraq at the onset of the 1980 war, speaking at an OPEC meeting earlier that year. An Incomplete Calendar concludes at the moment in 1980 when secular solidarity among“third world” OPEC members was supplanted by political Islam, revolution, and war, yet the Caracas auditorium scenes hint at a different path.

Upcoming US screenings of An Incomplete Calendar include the Boston Palestine Film Festival until October 25, following its showings at the Valdivia International Film Festival in Chile until October 18 and the Cali International Film Festival in Colombia until October 25.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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