Sanaz Sohrabi’s new documentary, Scenes of Extraction, will have its World premiere at Berlinale’s Forum Expanded programme, one of 33 works from 19 countries that are screening at this year’s event. View the full lineup of films here. The festival runs from February 16-26th. Congrats, Sanaz!
About the film: Scenes of Extraction creates an archival constellation with the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British geophysical expeditions that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in South East Asia. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismography” method for oil exploration which was heavily tested across the Iranian oil belt despite its destructive and probable nature. The film unpacks the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran.
Scenes of Extraction was commissioned by VOX — Centre de l'image contemporaine, Montréal. It is the second episode of a trilogy of essay films that unpack the relationship between political economy of photography, archival technologies, and visual history of resource extraction in Iran. The first episode is One Image, Two Acts (2020) which has been screened in over two dozen film festivals and has won seven international awards since its World premiere at Montréal International Documentary Film Festival in November 2020.