Directed by Anahita Norouzi

Logline: A 34-minute experimental film essay that examines the transformation of southwestern Iran under British Petroleum’s extractive regime.

Synopsis: PETROSCAPE - نفط زار is an experimental film essay that fuses 16mm and 4K video, archival fragments, speculative narration, CGI animation, and contemporary landscapes.

Set in southwestern Iran, the film traces the role of British Petroleum in the modernization of the region, transforming a rural landscape into a colonial outpost through the exploitation of its oil reserves. Divided into three chapters, it explores how the landscape and social fabric of the region were reshaped by extractive practices, leaving behind a terrain marked by ecological ruination, dispossession, and spiritual contamination.

Distribution Contact: WFG

More Details

RUNTIME: 34 Minutes
GENRE: Documentary, Experimental
PRODUCTION FORMAT: 16mm, 4K
LANGUAGE: Persian, English
LOCATION: Canada
KEYWORDS: Art, Environment, Historical, Politics

Director's Statement: PETROSCAPE was made through an imposed distance. I could not return to Iran to shoot during the 2025 Iran–Israel war, so that distance became part of the film’s method: a crew dispersed across different geographies, with images, sounds, edits, and conversations travelling between places. That condition of diaspora entered the structure of the film itself: a work made through the desire to reach a place that remains politically and physically difficult to access.

PETROSCAPE was also made in the shadow of two systems of censorship: the difficulty of speaking from Iran, about Iran, without facing restriction, fear, and surveillance; and, in Britain, the impossibility of open access to the colonial archive. The film sits between these pressures — one trying to manage the narrative of the present, the other still controlling the narrative of past.

For this reason, I chose not to work from BP’s official archive. Important recent films have drawn on that material, but I did not want the company archive to become the film’s frame of reference. Instead, PETROSCAPE is built from archival fragments I found and purchased on eBay: personal photographs, postcards, maps, books, and small historical traces circulating through the strange randomness of an online flea market — an intimate, dispersed, vernacular archive of accident rather than authority.