Canadian Premiere
A long-forgotten vinyl record opens a window into the political history of oil in Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi’s An Incomplete Calendar. Recorded in 1980 for OPEC’s 20th anniversary, the album — Rhymes and Songs for OPEC by the Concert Choir of the Central University of Venezuela — is an unlikely guide through interlocking narratives of resource sovereignty, Palestinian liberation, Pan-Arab politics, and cultural exchange across the Global South.
A cinematic collage of songs, postcards, magazines, political writings, and television footage, Sohrab’s film depicts oil through neither the lens of commodity or catastrophe, but rather the traces of what it represents: power, violence, friendship, propaganda, and unfinished dreams. The final chapter in Sohrabi’s trilogy on images, extraction, and oil in Iran and West Asia, An Incomplete Calendar won the First Film Loridan-Ivens Award and the GNCR Young Jury Award at Cinéma du Réel. It is a film of fragments, but is never scattered. Each piece deepens the question of what history remembers — and what it leaves incomplete.
Content Considerations: Colonialism, resource exploitation, political conflict
Loridan-Ivens Award, Cinéma du Réel 2026; Young Jury Award (GNCR); Cinéma du Réel 2026; Best Feature Film: International, Curtiba 2026; Jury Award for Best Feature Film: International, Pesaro 2026
Community Partner
Jihan El-Tahri, Murtaza Vali, Laleh Khalili, Layla Maghribi, Eduardo Prato Moros, Leonardo Montaño Salas
Canada/Iran/Turkey/Venezuela
2026
In Arabic, English, Farsi, and Spanish with English subtitles
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Credits & Director
Producer
Sanaz Sohrabi, Burak Çevik
Screenwriter
Sanaz Sohrabi
Cinematography
Siavash Naghshbandi, Ignacio Márquez, Omar Mohamed
Editor
Sanaz Sohrabi, Muhammad Nour El-Khairy
Original Music
Jeremy Leon
Sanaz Sohrabi
Sanaz Sohrabi, born 1988 in Tehran, is a researcher of visual culture and an artist-filmmaker currently based in Montreal. With a focus on visual histories of resource sovereignty and post-colonial ecologies from the Global South, her films and installations have been shown and awarded in various festivals and biennials including Berlinale, IFFR, Ljubljana Biennial (2023), and Museum of Contemporary Art Montréal (MAC). Her first documentary feature, An Incomplete Calendar (2026), premiered at Cinéma du Réel.
Filmography: Notes on Seeing Double (2018); One Image, Two Acts (2020); Scenes of Extraction (2023)
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