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 (Nariman Massoumi, 2023, 26 mins) 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.

The screening of the film will be followed by a discussion with the director Dr Nariman Massoumi, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB research challenge Representation, Belonging, Futures.

'Pouring Water on Troubled Oil' - MMB Film Screening and Discussion