Pouring Water on Troubled Oil – February 26th
Film at 6:30pm – Wednesday, February 26th
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
Pouring Water on Troubled Oil
(2023, Nariman Massoumi, United Kingdom & Iran, 26min, in English w/ English subtitles)
In 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company set out to produce a Technicolour publicity film promoting its activities in Iran. They hired the renowned Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to write the film script, a little known aspect of his life. Combining colonial archival photographs with Thomas’s lyrical account (performed in voiceover by actor 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.
Film Screening
Wednesday, February 26th
Free and open to the public
Introduction and Q&A by Nariman Massoumi (Director of Pouring Water on Troubled Oil)
Co-Sponsored by:
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Introduction by
Director of Pouring Water on Troubled Oil
Nariman Massoumi
Q&A following the screening
Nariman Massoumi is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at University of Bristol (UK), with a background in documentary television at the BBC. His film practice and research centres on life histories of colonialism, diaspora and the British-Iranian encounter using ethnographic and archive-based methods. His films include the BBC documentary Health Before the Health Service (2011) on pre-NHS healthcare in Britain, autobiographical films Baba 1989 (2016) and How Do You See Me? (2017) and Dear Home Office (2021), a collaborative film with refugees and asylum seekers scrutinising the UK asylum system.
Trailer