“An exhaustive and artistically fulfilling, essayistic documentary about a region’s struggle for autonomy and solidarity.”

Anyone remember the 1980 album “Rhymes and Songs for OPEC” by the Concert Choir of Central University of Venezuela? Don’t be ashamed if you don’t, it wasn’t exactly a chart topper. But this obscure musical oddity is the jumping-off point for Iranian director Sanaz Sohrabi’s collage documentary An Incomplete Calendar, the final part in a trilogy focused on the role of oil in the recent history of the Middle East. While the first two parts, 2020’s One Image, Two Acts and 2023’s Sahnehaye Estekhraj, primarily dealt with Sohrabi’s native country and the influence of British Petroleum on it, she casts a wider net in this final installment, expanding not just throughout the Middle East, but going to Africa and beyond, to end up in a theater in Caracas, Venezuela.

1960 marked an important moment in the history of the formerly colonialized Middle East, with the formation of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). Thirteen oil-producing countries nationalized their industry and formed a bloc against the Seven Sisters, the Western world’s seven most influential oil companies. It was an incredible power shift, and one that the powers-that-be in the West didn’t take lightly. With an industry built on top of a colonialist structure, the petrodollars flowing in brought a rapid modernization to countries like Saudi Arabia, while for others like Libya and Iraq, oil provided political leverage for the thorny issues of Palestine and Pan-Arabic solidarity. These diverging paths revealed cracks in the pact early on, especially when Abdullah Tariki, the then Saudi foreign minister, went into exile in Beirut because his Pan-Arabic political views weren’t appreciated in Riyadh. But the biggest threat to OPEC’s influence spreading like an oil spill was always the West, and after the Six-Day War in 1967 and OPEC’s oil embargo six years later, the West, led as always by the United States, resolved they would never be at the mercy of the Arab nations again. They undermined countries like Libya, Iraq, and Iran by letting the petrodollars flow back to the West, into the expanding banking sector and into the US weapons industry.

The oil money also created other, more unexpected links though, and not to the West. It created an emerging culture industry in the so-called Global South, especially in Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The brand new Museum of Modern Art in Tehran bought works of renowned American artists and had a pool of oil as an art installation at its heart, a nod to what made the museum possible in the first place. The modernist architecture of the building provides a connection to Venezuela and the Aula Magna of the University City of Caracas, whose iconic acoustic ceiling panels were designed by American sculptor Alexander Calder. Suddenly, in the ’70s, Tehran and Caracas were connected through contemporary art and modernist architecture. And through music, which brings us back to that obscure vinyl (ironically, an oil product): in 1980, a Venezuelan musical director resolved to create an album with music from all 13 (at the time) OPEC countries, performed by a local choir and local musicians. Sohrabi incorporates footage from Venezuelan TV that shows this album at least received some attention in Venezuela itself, even if it is now a curio. But it is also another expression of solidarity reached between countries in the Global South through OPEC and through oil, an act of defiance against the West that had dominated and colonized it.

This musical project was not the only way solidarity was shown, An Incomplete Calendar tells us. Stamps also played an important role, with each of the countries releasing series dedicated to OPEC and to ‘progress through solidarity’. Sohrabi displays these stamps not just in isolation, but on empty envelopes too, a symbolic way of showing that their contents did not always reach the intended eyes, and also highlighting the fragility of the solidarity the OPEC countries liked to display to the outside world. The West, under the influence and guidance of the US, wrestled OPEC out of power, and from the mid-70s onward the solidarity theme was slowly replaced by Islam as the dominant ideology, in particular in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. In 1980, one month after the release of “Rhymes and Songs for OPEC”, the Iran-Iraq War starts. OPEC is at war with itself, instigated by a West that supports Iraq.

Sohrabi presents all of this in one big information dump, through a collage of images, objects such as the aforementioned stamps, and video (mainly VHS) footage of the live performance of “Rhymes and Songs for OPEC” on Venezuelan TV, and also through interviews with several experts with knowledge of the history of OPEC as well as the broader history of the tug of war over oil between the newly independent nations and their former colonizers. A film strictly for those interested in that history and how oil in the Middle East has shaped perception and the West’s aggression against the region, An Incomplete Calendar is an exhaustive and artistically fulfilling, essayistic documentary about a region’s struggle for autonomy and solidarity. That Sohrabi sometimes pulls a few too many strands into the narrative, such as a sidestep to the ANC’s Radio Freedom in South Africa, does not change that fact.