World Premiere: Berlinale Forum Expanded, Feb 2023 Upcoming screenings: Polish Premiere: 20th Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival, Poland, May-June 2023 Finnish Premiere: BlackLight Festival, Tampere Finland North American Premiere: BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia, August 2023 Latin American Premiere: FRONTEIRA Documentary Film Festival, Brasilia, August 2023 UK Premiere: Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, Sep 10th, 2023 Italian Premiere in Main Competition: The Archivio Aperto Film Festival: The Future is Memory, Bologna, Italy, Oct 2023 Middle East Studies Association Film Festival, Oct-Nov, 2023 Art and science exhibition, Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia, Oct-Nov 2023 35th Ljubljana Biennale Film Program curated by Exit Frame Collective, Museum in Modern Art, Ljubljana Slovenia, November 17 2023 “Visualizing Extraction,” Film screening and conversation with Philip Scheffner, Filmhaus, Cologne, Dec 12 2023 Scottish Premiere: Glasgow Film Festival: Gestures of Memory, Glasgow, March 1st 2024 “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.
