The Culturist Film Club: An Incomplete Calendar on October 2
On Friday, October 2, The Culturist Film Club will be hosted at Alserkal Arts Foundation’s Project Space. I will present An Incomplete Calendar by Sanaz Sohrabi, and moderate a discussion with her.
An Incomplete Calendar premiered at Cinéma du Réel in March this year where it won two awards (First Film Loridan-Ivens Award and Gncr–Young Jury Award), and since then it has participated in multiple international film festivals and won a couple of more awards.
Date: Friday, October 2 at 7:30pm
Location: Alserkal Arts Foundation, Project Space, Alserkal Avenue (Warehouse 51)
Free to attend, but registration is required before attending. Please register here.
AN INCOMPLETE CALENDAR
Sanaz Sohrabi, 2026, 77 min
A little-known 1980 vinyl is the starting point of this film. “Rhymes and Songs for OPEC” is a special record by the Central University of Venezuela’s concert choir to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Layered with songs and rarely seen archives, the film reframes oil not as commodity but as a political leverage for liberation struggles and Pan-Arab solidarity between 1960-1970.
This is the final episode of a trilogy of essay films by Sanaz Sohrabi that unpack the relationship between political economy of images, archival technologies, and visual cultures of resource extraction in Iran and broader West Asia.
“An exhaustive and artistically fulfilling, essayistic documentary about a region’s struggle for autonomy and solidarity.” — Marc van de Klashorst, International Cinephile Society
“Drawing on this musical archive, Sohrabi tells a different history of OPEC: that of an axis of solidarity initiated in 1959 at the first Arab Petroleum Congress in Cairo, where, as a resource, oil was conceived not as an instrument of neoliberal domination, but as a political lever in the liberation struggles of the Global South, and of Palestine in particular. As part of its rich, multifaceted form, which rearranges elements from a previous installation, Sohrabi brings together various visual archives – records, stamps, letters, magazines, films and photographs – to map the political ambivalences arising from the clash between militant nationalism and decolonial politics between 1950 and 1980. At a time of widespread upheaval, An Incomplete Calendar is a timely intervention.” — Antoine Thirion, Cinéma du Réel
Awards:
First Film Loridan-Ivens Award + GNCR–Young Jury Award - Cinéma du Réel International Documentary Film Festival, France, 2026
Best Feature Film (International Competition) - Olhar do Cinema Curitiba International Film Festival, Brazil, 2026
Best Feature Film (International Competition) - Pesaro Film Festival, Italy, 2026
Sanaz Sohrabi will join us online for a discussion moderated by me.
About Sanaz Sohrabi:
A researcher of visual culture and artist-filmmaker based in Montréal, working 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 Cinema du Réel, where it won the Loridan-Ivens first feature and the Young Jury award.
This event is supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation.