In 1980, to mark OPEC’s twentieth anniversary, the concert choir of the Central University of Venezuela recorded Rhymes and Songs for OPEC: folk songs performed phonetically in Farsi, Arabic dialects and Yoruba. Sanaz Sohrabi discovered this improbable vinyl in 2019 and began following its sonic map of oil across continents.
Layering its songs with rare newsreels, anticolonial magazines, stamps and ephemera gathered over six years, the film revisits an era when newly independent nations sought control over their natural resources. Oil appears not only as a commodity driving colonial extraction, but as political leverage connecting OPEC, Palestinian liberation and Pan-Arab and Third World solidarity during the 1960s and 1970s.
The final film in Sohrabi’s trilogy on the visual cultures of extraction in Iran and West Asia, An Incomplete Calendar refuses to present history as settled or complete. Through music, translation and rhythmic montage, it gathers the fragments of a partly erased political calendar—recovering collective ambitions, contradictions and utopian promises still waiting to be realised.
Presented in collaboration with Masahat
