The new film An Incomplete Calendar, by the Iranian Canadian artist and film-maker Sanaz Sohrabi, thoughtfully employs archival footage and ephemera about the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), reframing the oil cartel as both an agent of anti-imperialist solidarity and an unlikely vehicle for peace through cultural exchange.
Shown at the Vancouver International Film Festival earlier this month after winning a prize for the best debut feature this past March at the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, with a plethora of upcoming festival screenings, the film is especially timely in the midst of US and Israel’s war with Iran. In it, Sohrabi subverts the typical talking-heads documentary format by using poetic voiceovers—her own as well as those of the writer and curator Murtaza Vali, scholar Laleh Khalili, journalist Layla Maghribi, professor Leonardo Montaño Salas and others—as she visually centres archival materials.
“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,” Sohrabi said in a statement. “I collected a repository of archives without reali...