Sweeping Sets of Ephemera
New films by María Rojas Arias & Andrés Jurado, and Sanaz Sohrabi
Georgie Carr
Filme Pin
Director MARÍA ROJAS ARIAS & ANDRÉS JURADO
Year 2026
Country COLOMBIA, PORTUGAL
An Incomplete Calendar
Director SANAZ SOHRABI
Year
2026
Country CANADA, VENEZUELA, IRAN, TURKEY
In his essay ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’ (1983), the photographer and writer Allan Sekula examined a book of photographs taken in the coal mining area of Cape Breton during the mid-twentieth century, and wondered how to understand the social relations of that time and place. As an archive, the images seemed to provide a straightforward record of the areas’ economic hierarchies—its coal companies, local elites and mine workers. Nevertheless, the ease of this interpretation was deceptive, he believed. “Anyone who has sorted or simply sifted through a box of family snapshots understands the dilemmas (and perhaps the folly) inherent in these procedures”—the contradictions and omissions occasioned by the organisation and inventory of any archive. For Sekula, the work of narrativizing and categorising materials tended towards occlusion, while the archive’s claim to documentary authority inclined towards empiricism. Who does the archive serve, he wondered? Throwing down the gauntlet, he suggested that “the archival perspective is closer to that of the capitalist, the professional positivist, the bureaucrat and the engineer—not to mention the connoisseur—than it is to that of the working class. Generally speaking, working-class culture is not built on such high ground.”
Like Sekula’s family photographer, María Rojas Arias & Andrés Jurado’s Filme Pin constructs its archive at the smallest scale: a box of solidarity badges discovered in the attic, following the death of the grandfather of one of the filmmakers. Each pin is filmed in turn, close-up against a dark background, icons of both global significance and more local concern: a miniature metal profile of Lenin; a badge for solidarity with the Kurdish people; a pin for the Essex University Communist Society. But Filme Pin is, contra Sekula’s professional positivist, uncertain of its own authority. The film’s voice-over, which might usually contain an expert’s knowledge, laughs shyly, while the filmmakers speak about the construction of the shot, anxious about their own capacity for legibility. The sounds of a Super 8mm camera and the clink of the box of badges are untethered from the images on screen, foregrounding the constructedness of the image, which is left un-unified. At the same time, these archivists make no consistent claim to understand their archive. “I don’t know what this one means.” They are, simply, “all about solidarity.”
These deliberate gaps foreground the need for interpretation, and for individual historical inquiry. I had to lean towards to screen to examine a badge depicting the Brandenburg Gate on the 13th of August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built. At the level of the image, however, there are no gaps, at least no cutaways to contextual information, just the placement of the pins in quick succession. Slowly, however, the badges reveal a more specific narrative, the international struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and its solidarity networks across Brazil, England, Portugal, South Africa and Guinea-Bissau. Increasingly, the voiceover connects these images to the filmmaker’s own life, examining how a family is formed through political struggle. While, in their multiplicity, the badges operate through the symbolic register of international communist insignia, in their montaged combination they also come to narrate a more personal narrative: the political commitments of one man’s life. When the filmmaker adds her own Palestine Solidarity Campaign pin to the set, she indicates the ongoing construction of an archive that exists at multiple scales, and its links to the politics of the present: ‘My causes’, too. By marking its omissions and emotions so openly, Filme Pin suggests that the moving image offers a reflexivity that Sekula’s book of photographic stills could not provide.
Sanaz Sohrabi’s An Incomplete Calendar constructs an archive at far a larger scale. The film examines the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and questions the power of oil as a weapon of anticolonial resistance. In doing so, Sohrabi assembles a sweeping set of ephemera: photographs, clips from the industrial cinemas of oil fields, newsreel footage of pan-Arab politics, postage stamps from decolonising nations and pages from petroleum magazines. Using split-screens, image layering and sound effects which evoke the steady gloop of oil, Sohrabi combines material to emphasise the momentous shifts in the political economy of oil as OPEC nations nationalised their reserves in the 1960s and 1970s—what the historian Christopher Dietrich has termed the “most concentrated non-violent transfer of global wealth in human history.”
In 1980, the Concert Choir of Central University of Venezuela produced an album and toured concert halls world-wide, celebrating OPEC’s twentieth anniversary by performing traditional songs from each member nation. This activity, Sohrabi asserts, comprised a swansong to what was, by that time, a shattered landscape of anticolonial solidarity. Examining the thirty years prior to the release of this record, from Mohammed Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iranian oil in 1951, to the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, An Incomplete Calendar examines oil’s visibility, in which images of production and use were made central to the communication of anticolonial ideas. This visibility stands in contrast to the hidden power of hydrocarbons. In his book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (2024), the political economist Adam Hanieh explores oil’s centrality to capitalist modernity from the 1950s onwards, as it came to undergird the whole process of capital accumulation—commodity production, petrochemicals, modern urbanism and warfare—to allow for the production of energy at previously impossible magnitudes. Oil is everywhere, “but, at the same time, so much of what oil does for capitalism is invisible.” In the face of this ubiquity, the density of An Incomplete Calendar’s material seeks to defamiliarise oil’s centrality to daily life. In doing so, the film appropriates the gaze of Sekula’s capitalists, bureaucrats and engineers, in the hope of re-examining their power. But the film also records an irony. For in assembling so many materials that are shown too quickly to read in detail, Sohrabi shows how the motion of the moving image can once more relocate the photographic archive to the high ground of abstraction. Seen together, Filme Pin and An Incomplete Calendar reveal cinema’s capacity to subvert both scales.
Georgie Carr’s writing can be found in publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Another Gaze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Screen. She lives in London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme Filme Pin + An Incomplete Calendar at Barbican Cinema, 16 April 2026.
Like Sekula’s family photographer, María Rojas Arias & Andrés Jurado’s Filme Pin constructs its archive at the smallest scale: a box of solidarity badges discovered in the attic, following the death of the grandfather of one of the filmmakers. Each pin is filmed in turn, close-up against a dark background, icons of both global significance and more local concern: a miniature metal profile of Lenin; a badge for solidarity with the Kurdish people; a pin for the Essex University Communist Society. But Filme Pin is, contra Sekula’s professional positivist, uncertain of its own authority. The film’s voice-over, which might usually contain an expert’s knowledge, laughs shyly, while the filmmakers speak about the construction of the shot, anxious about their own capacity for legibility. The sounds of a Super 8mm camera and the clink of the box of badges are untethered from the images on screen, foregrounding the constructedness of the image, which is left un-unified. At the same time, these archivists make no consistent claim to understand their archive. “I don’t know what this one means.” They are, simply, “all about solidarity.”
These deliberate gaps foreground the need for interpretation, and for individual historical inquiry. I had to lean towards to screen to examine a badge depicting the Brandenburg Gate on the 13th of August 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built. At the level of the image, however, there are no gaps, at least no cutaways to contextual information, just the placement of the pins in quick succession. Slowly, however, the badges reveal a more specific narrative, the international struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and its solidarity networks across Brazil, England, Portugal, South Africa and Guinea-Bissau. Increasingly, the voiceover connects these images to the filmmaker’s own life, examining how a family is formed through political struggle. While, in their multiplicity, the badges operate through the symbolic register of international communist insignia, in their montaged combination they also come to narrate a more personal narrative: the political commitments of one man’s life. When the filmmaker adds her own Palestine Solidarity Campaign pin to the set, she indicates the ongoing construction of an archive that exists at multiple scales, and its links to the politics of the present: ‘My causes’, too. By marking its omissions and emotions so openly, Filme Pin suggests that the moving image offers a reflexivity that Sekula’s book of photographic stills could not provide.
Sanaz Sohrabi’s An Incomplete Calendar constructs an archive at far a larger scale. The film examines the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and questions the power of oil as a weapon of anticolonial resistance. In doing so, Sohrabi assembles a sweeping set of ephemera: photographs, clips from the industrial cinemas of oil fields, newsreel footage of pan-Arab politics, postage stamps from decolonising nations and pages from petroleum magazines. Using split-screens, image layering and sound effects which evoke the steady gloop of oil, Sohrabi combines material to emphasise the momentous shifts in the political economy of oil as OPEC nations nationalised their reserves in the 1960s and 1970s—what the historian Christopher Dietrich has termed the “most concentrated non-violent transfer of global wealth in human history.”
In 1980, the Concert Choir of Central University of Venezuela produced an album and toured concert halls world-wide, celebrating OPEC’s twentieth anniversary by performing traditional songs from each member nation. This activity, Sohrabi asserts, comprised a swansong to what was, by that time, a shattered landscape of anticolonial solidarity. Examining the thirty years prior to the release of this record, from Mohammed Mosaddegh’s nationalisation of Iranian oil in 1951, to the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, An Incomplete Calendar examines oil’s visibility, in which images of production and use were made central to the communication of anticolonial ideas. This visibility stands in contrast to the hidden power of hydrocarbons. In his book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (2024), the political economist Adam Hanieh explores oil’s centrality to capitalist modernity from the 1950s onwards, as it came to undergird the whole process of capital accumulation—commodity production, petrochemicals, modern urbanism and warfare—to allow for the production of energy at previously impossible magnitudes. Oil is everywhere, “but, at the same time, so much of what oil does for capitalism is invisible.” In the face of this ubiquity, the density of An Incomplete Calendar’s material seeks to defamiliarise oil’s centrality to daily life. In doing so, the film appropriates the gaze of Sekula’s capitalists, bureaucrats and engineers, in the hope of re-examining their power. But the film also records an irony. For in assembling so many materials that are shown too quickly to read in detail, Sohrabi shows how the motion of the moving image can once more relocate the photographic archive to the high ground of abstraction. Seen together, Filme Pin and An Incomplete Calendar reveal cinema’s capacity to subvert both scales.
Georgie Carr’s writing can be found in publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Another Gaze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Screen. She lives in London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the programme Filme Pin + An Incomplete Calendar at Barbican Cinema, 16 April 2026.