This is a past event
OilScapes/Film delves into artistic responses to the ecology of oil, exploring the connections and disjunctions between (human) mobility and the (natural) environment as they are shaped by the global oil industry.
Winner of the Polly Krakora award for artistry in film, Washington Environment Film Festival, March 2011
Behind this enigmatic name lies the first and largest offshore oil town ever built. This vast, sprawling web of oil platforms in the middle of the Caspian Sea was commissioned by Stalin in 1949. It now consists of 264 offshore drilling platforms and more than 180 kilometres of connecting bridges, making it the oldest and largest complex of its kind in the world.
Director Marc Wolfensberger led the first Western film crew ever granted permission to make a documentary on the site. The result is a stunning visual portrait of a unique environment, the scale of the site accentuated by the use of long shots of the seemingly endless roads that stretch right out into the sea.
Combining footage documenting this strange and barren location with unique archival material dating back to the era in which this ‘city above the sea’ was constructed, the film tells the tale of the city’s inhabitants, who live and work far from the countries of their birth.
The platform is home to the thousand or more workers still employed there, many of whom spend most of their lives in Oil Rocks, inhabiting the run-down housing blocks that are part of the legacy of the Soviet era. Much of the original construction, however, has already been lost to the sea and so in bearing witness to the processes of natural destruction that make this a precarious environment, the film also seeks to preserve this unique site of oil extraction.
- Hosted by
- Peacock Visual Arts
- Venue
- Auris Lecture Theatre, Aberdeen
- Contact
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info@peacockvisualarts.co.uk