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CWC Global: Scenes of Extraction
with filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi
Thursday, March 5 / 7:00 PM
Pollock Theater, UCSB
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Scenes of Extraction (2023) creates an archival constellation using the still and moving images of British Petroleum, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British energy complex that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in South East Asia. The film 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 nature. This technical legacy is still heavily utilized in fracking and deep-sea mining enterprises globally and forms the backbone of the global energy complex. By reading the political economy of images in relation to the extraction of crude oil, Scenes of Extraction evokes the intertwined histories of imperial and colonial extractive industries, photography, and archival practice.
Filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi will join moderator Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of Scenes of Extraction.
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Sanaz Sohrabi (filmmaker)
Sanaz Sohrabi is an artist, researcher of visual culture, and an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication and Media Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. Sohrabi works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and visual history of resource extraction and postcolonial sovereignty in Iran. Her current project is conceived as a trilogy of essay films, consisting of One Image, Two Acts (2020), Scenes of Extraction (2023), and An Incomplete Calendar (projected for release in 2026-2027).
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Moderator Mona Damluji
(Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Mona Damluji is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Mona’s teaching, research and creative work engages underrepresented media histories and cultural studies of energy, cities, and infrastructure centered in the Middle East and its diasporas. Her book Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq (2026) is a history of how multinational petroleum companies have shaped local cultural norms and global popular imaginaries of oil in Iran and Iraq through film use and cultural sponsorship in the twentieth century.
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