Film Screening: 'Pouring Water on Troubled Oil'

In 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company set out to produce a Technicolour publicity film promoting its activities in Iran. Curiously, they hired Dylan Thomas, the world renowned Welsh poet and author of Under Milk Wood. 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 encounter with oil and colonialism, as a political upheaval for oil nationalisation unfolds. Thomas's job, he would later remark, was to “pour water on troubled oil”.​

What to expect

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the filmmaker Dr Nariman Massoumi, Associate Professor in Film, and Dr Mattin Biglari, Lecturer in Asian and Middle Eastern Environmental History and expert on oil and colonisation in Iran.​