An Incomplete Calendar Spectrum
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About
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
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
