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

Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB)conducts research that expands and challenges understandings of mobility in order to contribute to a more just world. We foster creative and interdisciplinary thinking by engaging with theory and the arts as well as law, policy and practice to explore human mobility and its social relations. We build connections between the local and the global, the present and the past.

Migration Mobilities Bristol

Short film screening of 'Pouring Water on Troubled Oil' (2023) followed by discussion with filmmaker Nariman Massoumi.

Department of Film and Television Cinema

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.<a href="https://borderlinesfilmfestival.co.uk/film/pouring-water-troubled-oil#:~:text=The%20documentary%20combines%20colonial%20archival%20photographs%20with%20the,Iran%2C%201961%2C%2025%20minutes%2C%20Farsi%20%2B%20English%20subtitles." title="https://borderlinesfilmfestival.co.uk/film/pouring-water-troubled-oil#:~:text=The%20documentary%20combines%20colonial%20archival%20photographs%20with%20the,Iran%2C%201961%2C%2025%20minutes%2C%20Farsi%20%2B%20English%20subtitles." target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Pouring Water on Troubled Oil </a>(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 <a href="https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Nariman-Massoumi-4793cc76-0b95-4cd4-94ea-a8fc62b5b48b/" title="https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Nariman-Massoumi-4793cc76-0b95-4cd4-94ea-a8fc62b5b48b/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr Nariman Massoumi</a>, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Bristol, and Co-ordinator of the MMB research challenge <a href="https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/research/imagination-belonging-futures/" title="https://migration.bristol.ac.uk/research/imagination-belonging-futures/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Representation, Belonging, Futures</a>.

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

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