Pouring Water on Troubled Oil

In 1951, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas travelled to Iran on an assignment to write a propaganda film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Thomas’s job, he would later remark, was to “pour water on troubled oil”. Combining colonial archival photographs with Thomas’s lyrical account, performed in voiceover by Michael Sheen, this documentary film follows the poet’s journey through the country, capturing his haunting vision of oil and modernity, as a political upheaval for oil nationalisation unfolds.

This film is paired with The Queen of the Hills, by David & Judith MacDougall in a double bill.