Sanaz Sohrabi, Berlinale 2023“What is a complete image of oil?”: An Interview with Sanaz Sohrabi Botagoz Koilybayeva July 2026 Interviews Issue 118 “What does it mean if I blow up this tiny image and make it three metres long?” says Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi, when talking about the politics of images. Who does the looking? Who is being looked at? What does it mean to disrupt the fabric of the image and bring forward its forgotten stories and ghosts? In An Incomplete Calendar (2026), Sohrabi’s last instalment of her oil trilogy, the director investigates the promise that was the foundation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in Baghdad in 1960. It was a promise of transnational solidarity, decolonial political imaginary, energy sovereignty, but also a blind imitation of Western modernity in the countries crawling out of the colonial period. Across the whole trilogy, which includes One Image Two Acts (2020) and Scenes of Extraction (2023), Sohrabi excavates the history of oil through print and audiovisual archival materials: the British Petroleum archives provide a treasure trove of commissioned films on SWANA’s (Southwest Asia and North Africa) oil history. Sohrabi looks at this legacy differently. She also gleans the archives everywhere she can, mostly online: “They often feel like orphaned objects,” she says. An Incomplete Calendar In An Incomplete Calendar, Sohrabi employs a diaristic approach with an almost desktop-essay quality to it. Shot via the overhead camera station, newspaper clippings, magazine spreads, stamps, and envelopes are shuffled around by Sohrabi within the frame, with her hands visible, affirming her own presence. Snippets of archival video footage are superimposed onto these images or arranged side by side in a split screen. She also uses her own voice, speaking in English and Farsi, as well as the voices of other experts and participants in OPEC events who never appear as talking heads but remain a disembodied presence. Apart from archival research materials, Sohrabi ventures beyond the Gulf Coast and revisits places important to OPEC’s history, like the Central University of Venezuela, whose choir recorded a vinyl titled Rhymes and Songs for OPEC in 1980 to celebrate the organisation’s 20th anniversary. The vinyl, which features the Venezuelan choir phonetically performing songs in languages ranging from Persian and Arabic to Yoruba and Indonesian songs, forms a backbone of the film, a potent metaphor of the fragility of solidarity and the petrol modernity. Combining artistic commitment and scholarly rigour (Sohrabi is incredibly versed in critical theory and the theories of visual culture), Sohrabi not only guides us through a complex entanglement of the British colonial rule and the Pan-Arab solidarity movement, but also penetrates deeper than that: into the existential questions of extractivism – of resources, of images, of souls. I talked to Sohrabi shortly after seeing the film at this year’s Cinéma du Réel in Paris and found her reappropriation of the archival physical material dense but ultimately fascinating. Filmed before the current events in West Asia, the film attempts to untangle the tug-of-war over oil between the newly independent states and their former colonisers. – B.K. An Incomplete Calendar feels like a fully realised, standalone film. When you were developing the story, was it something that organically grew out of the two previous films? When I began working on One Image, Two Acts in 2020, I didn’t think of it as part of a trilogy. At that time, I was doing my doctoral research on the history of the British Petroleum Film Unit – particularly their photography practices, communication, and PR department, which was responsible for creating this massive production of photographs, magazines, and visual material. While working on the first two films, I found the vinyl Rhymes and Songs for OPEC, so I discovered this other world of images of oil. Honestly, I was unsure how I would put it all together, because it was a very challenging collection of archives, really eclectic: in multiple languages, eras, and countries. An Incomplete Calendar At first, I wrote a couple of articles, then I worked on a series of exhibitions. Eventually, I realised it was a film. The final exhibition at the Ljubljana Biennale 2023 was the most comprehensive. I treated the exhibition space as an editing room, working on it as a timeline. Much of what appeared there directly informed the structure of the film; it was really a process. From the start, I was asking: what is a complete image of oil? And the answer is that it is always incomplete. In order to grasp that incompleteness, we must consider colonial and postcolonial histories, their ruptures and continuities, contradictions and similarities. We need to look at what was produced by colonial powers and nationalised and independent states alike to understand their social relations and cultural production. When you describe the Ljubljana Biennial as your “editing room,” are you referring to An Incomplete Calendar or the entire trilogy? It was specifically for An Incomplete Calendar. The first two films were more straightforward since I was dealing with a corporate archive. An Incomplete Calendar is different – it’s more like a depository, or an inventory. It’s an extremely eclectic collection I gathered over the years, and it’s still growing. In fact, I was buying these interesting stamps from Yemen just yesterday! These materials have a particular way of resurfacing; they often feel like orphaned objects. What sparked your interest in the BP archives? I first came across the work of Mona Damluji in 2017, and I was completely blown away. Her book, Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq, just came out. Mona and I met for the first time in 2023 at the Block Museum of Art, where we were on a panel together. Her research on BP began almost by accident when she saw a film called Ageless Iraq circulating on YouTube. It was produced by the Iraq Petroleum Company. She realised there was literally no book on the history of BP films made in Iran and Iraq. That absence became the foundation of her doctoral project. She essentially pioneered this field. An Incomplete Calendar Was it easy to access the BP archives? It’s not particularly difficult – many researchers have worked with the archive. My longest visit was in 2022 when I was a researcher in residence at the University of Warwick. I was working with Katayoun Shafiee in the history department, who has spent years studying BP’s legal history. Her syllabus is deeply connected to the archive, and her students work directly with the materials as part of their coursework. In that sense, the archive is quite accessible. However, materials are only publicly available up to 1954. Of course, there are clear limits, reflecting BP’s caution about what can be accessed and made available for research. What I find interesting is that across all three films, the materiality of the archival sources informs the way you present them visually and sonically. Did materials themselves guide your vision? I don’t come from a classical film background – I come from photography. I was trained in the histories and theories of photography, and from there I became really interested in essay films, particularly documentary essay films. That training really shaped how I think about images. I studied in the photography department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a program historically connected to the Düsseldorf School tradition, which became prominent in the late 1990s. That tradition is about questioning the medium of photography in relation to the construction of reality. For me, photographs are not necessarily witnesses to reality – they are part of social relations, embedded in political contexts. I’m interested in what happens within and across materiality of images; in how they are printed, reprinted, scaled up, cut up. What does it mean if I blow up this tiny image and make it three metres long? The same image can exist in multiple forms. It’s about asking: how do images evolve as social relations and across different materialities? An Incomplete Calendar The materials span English, Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi. How did you approach languages in the film? In the first two films, the materials were primarily in English, so I used a Farsi voiceover, making the film first and foremost for a Farsi-speaking audience. Language became a much more complex question in An Incomplete Calendar. The vinyl takes the question of language to a whole new level, because it suggests that understanding isn’t always necessary. Even if we don’t understand a language, we can still learn it phonetically, repeat, and inhabit it differently. So the film became a form of annotation. I started thinking about language not just as the metadata of the archival materials, but as a politics of access: who can understand, who can participate, and how can I use the annotation and translation as a form of intervention. I am curious what you think about the reappropriation or manipulation of archival material. I remember a moment during a residency while working on One Image, Two Acts. I had set up an overhead camera station and printed many BP photographs in different sizes and duplicates. There was one image I kept returning to: a low-resolution image where, when you zoom in, you would notice three workers in the shadow. There was something really haunting about these forms: an industrial mise en scène where the bodies become one with the infrastructure. Then, completely by chance, I had this other photo printed and placed it nearby, which also had three bodies in a different kind of industrial milieu: the swimming pool in Ahmadi oil town in Kuwait. The other image was from Abadan in Iran. These two images spoke directly to each other 20 years apart; it was like a ghostly repetition. That moment made me realise how much working with archives depends on chance encounters and on ways of seeing. I spend a lot of time with images – cropping them, zooming in, pinning them on walls – because details don’t reveal themselves immediately; they come out of the shadows. There were a lot of these moments while working on An Incomplete Calendar. I was working on the film for six years, having collected a lot of material without knowing they would be part of the film, or that they would speak with each other. In a way, working with archives is about building relationships with them. An Incomplete Calendar Your appearance at the end of the film seems to implicate you more directly in the story. How do you see your own presence there? Well, there are a few reasons for that. Part of that decision was about space. The Aula Magna’s stage was such a historically monumental site where many important conferences and speeches have taken place. Earlier in the film Leonardo Montano Salas, a former concert choir member, reads part of the script of the film in Farsi. He returned to his usual spot on the stage where he would normally stand. Originally, the idea was to read part of the script while driving through Cairo, but that idea didn’t materialise. In the end, the stage made sense because it was always about a chorus, the concert choir, people coming together. Even though I am addressing an empty hall, there’s a sense of the ghost of past audiences. Speaking of collaborators, why did you decide to keep the invited experts disembodied, aside from the choirmaster? It was less about bringing experts but about researchers and artists whose work has deeply inspired me, and we have built friendships throughout the years. I realised I did not carry the entire story, and I could not be the only story teller. I recorded over 20 hours of interviews with 10 people via Zoom. Through Layla Maghribi, I became increasingly interested in the presence of Palestinians in the oil industry after the Nakba. Many displaced Palestinians went on to study in the countries along the Persian Gulf. In Nasser’s Egypt, education was free, so a lot of Palestinians later studied there to work as petrochemical engineers, oil technocrats, and lawyers. The direction of the film was shaped by these personal anecdotes that I would not have known otherwise. I thought of the interviews as “archival conversation sessions.” For each person, I created a specific set of materials – stamps, magazines, music – and then we would go through the archives together. They responded to my questions, but also commented on the images, pointing out things. The decision has its pros and cons, I would say. Viewers may lose track of who is speaking, but I decided to embrace that. An Incomplete Calendar Did Layla help you with the decision to begin the timeline in Cairo? The person who helped me the most was Jihan El-Tahri, who both opens and closes the film. Jihan often starts the research for her films by creating chronologies. And that idea of chronology became central to the film. For me, it was really important to begin with Mohammad Mossadegh in Cairo, because his visit there is unknown to a lot of people. He travelled to Cairo in 1951 for a short but significant visit. Together with a friend from the art institution Wekalet Behna in Alexandria, Muhammad Amin, we did a lot of archival work in Cairo to find local newspapers and magazines covering that visit. Most widely circulated images of Mossadegh are by Time Magazine, but I deliberately avoided those. Using them would reproduce certain legitimacy I was trying to avoid. So if I’m working on a period, say, between 1950 and 1980, I would make calendrical yearly chronologies of what happened in 1955 in Egypt, in Libya, in the US, in Indonesia, in Iran. I would try to piece all of these things together. The idea of a calendar may imply something is linear, but it’s actually a nonlinear thinking, zigzagging and crisscrossing across different timelines and different years. It’s a way of breaking out of geographical and national silos. So Jihan’s approach toward non-linear chronologies was extremely instrumental for me. I believe it was Jihan who said in the voiceover that in the aftermath of colonialism, the countries were in some sense unprepared; they plunged directly into modernity without the space for reflection. I thought it was a fascinating and critical observation. They were not just victims. As Christopher Dietrich argues, we’re often dealing with what he calls the “oil elites” – the political elite class, national bourgeoisies within postcolonial states who were in charge of the broader national and developmental projects. So it’s not simply a matter of coloniser versus colonised. Because of that, I think it’s crucial not to approach this history nostalgically. It is important to remember what Frantz Fanon called having only “flag independence,” but still remaining colonised. It is not just obtaining a national flag, but achieving real economic autonomy, control over resources, currency, and national means of production. In the film, you draw the link between extraction and cultural production. Like showing the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as a symbol of wealth and modernity. How does one grapple with how extractivist practices shape global cultural production? The relationship between oil and global media culture is something I’ve been focusing on a lot since the BP projects. In media and film studies, there is a huge turn towards examining how oil and extractive industries intersect with the history of media and global media culture. This includes, for example, oil companies like BP and Shell commissioning films and establishing their own film units, but also how the industry has influenced culture more generally. It’s something that relates to different social histories and social paradigms – how oil is narrativised across different nations and different contexts, in countries like Iran, Iraq or Venezuela. An Incomplete Calendar I focus on how, in the 1950s and 60s, many newly independent countries in the Global South used media to represent themselves. For example, postage stamps were a very cheap and egalitarian mode of communication. They could be produced on a mass scale, sent across borders, and communicate national identity. Moving forward, with the rise of oil economies, oil wealth created secondary financial systems. In the film, Laleh Khalili speaks about “petrodollar recycling,” the phenomenon that occurred during the mid 1970s. The flow of capital was used to create different forms of hegemony: through culture, finances, and politics. Museums, for example, became essential markers of nationhood. As you can see in the film, they evolved differently in different countries, but there are similarities and repetitions. How have audiences in Iran responded to your work? I showed One Image, Two Acts at the Cinema Verité Film Festival, which is our major documentary festival in Iran, and it was really well-received, winning the International Mid-Length Award. When I was in Tehran in December, I discovered that my first two films were part of the curriculum at different independent film institutes and the Tehran University of Art’s cinema department. It was an honour to realise that. I think there is a growing interest in essay film, and archival essay film in particular. For a long time, I think artists and filmmakers in Tehran and in other cities have been trained to make a certain kind of film that fits expectations of European festivals, and that’s a problem. It is refreshing for them to see someone who lives abroad and still makes films for an Iranian audience in Iran. I’m making films that my uncle can also watch. As for An Incomplete Calendar, I would like to show it in Iran and was planning to show it at the House of Cinema. And of course, the war has made a huge impact. I was supposed to be in Tehran this spring. I’m planning to return once things feel more stable.
