'Pouring Water on Troubled Oil' Film Screening and Discussion

Thursday, 8^th May, 5pm-6pm

Department of Film and Television Cinema, 5th Floor, Richmond Building, 105-115 Queens Road

 

Please join us for this MMB hosted short film screening: Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (2023) followed by discussion with filmmaker Nariman Massoumi.

 

Synopsis: In 1951, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas travelled through Iran on an assignment to write a Technicolour prestige film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It was the company’s ‘most important publicity projects ever undertaken’, according to its film officer at the time. ‘My job’, Thomas would later remark, ‘was to pour water on troubled oil’. Taking place two years before his death, Dylan Thomas’s Iranian journey remains an intriguing yet unknown episode in the poet’s short and complicated life. Pouring Water on Troubled Oil is a short documentary film drawing directly from the poet's personal papers to chronicle his unique encounter with coloniality in mid-century Iran. Thomas's lyrical account (performed in voiceover by the actor Michael Sheen) is juxtaposed to rarely seen striking black and white photographs from the BP archives chronicling the colonial encounter, combined with an intricate and haunting soundscape, to capture the poet's sardonic vision of oil and modernity against the backdrop of political upheaval. Constructed entirely from archival sources, the film reconstitutes Thomas’s neglected and unrealised vision of Iranian oil – one which was both unrestrained by, and offers a counterpoint to, the company’s propagandist objectives. In doing so, it seeks to challenge existing presumptions of the imperviousness with which oil company’s shaped and controlled perceptions of oil.

 

Please register for the screening here - Pouring Water on Troubled Oil