Friday, October 18
︎ 18:00-20:40
︎ Coventry Transport Museum 

RAILROADS AND COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND IRAN

A STATE IN A STATE by Tekla Aslanishvili (46 mins) 
SCENES OF EXTRACTION by Sanaz Sohrabi (43 mins) 
+ Q&A (60 mins)

Screening Rights Film Festival is bringing the latest socially engaged and formally innovative cinema from the Global South to audiences in the West Midlands. This year, we’re partnering with the Transport Museum in Coventry to stage a site-specific event that engages with the industrial heritage of the Midlands, as well as the British Petroleum archives at the University of Warwick. Titled RAILROADS AND COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND IRAN, it features Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in a State alongside Sanaz Sohrabi’s Scenes of Extraction—two film essays that evoke detective investigations in the thoroughness of their research. In line with the 2024 festival’s theme, DOUBLE BILL, the screening tackles various geographical contexts that, on closer inspection, can be tenuously linked—in this case, British petrocolonialism in Iran and Soviet railroads in the South Caucasus.

A STATE IN A STATE

Tekla Aslanishvili / 2022 / Georgia / 47’ / Georgian, Russian, and English with English subtitles

In her symphonic, richly multilingual documentary, Georgian filmmaker Tekla Aslanishvili collects oral testimonies from railway workers, journalists, and researchers who worked on or around the railways that connect(ed) Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan with russia, Turkey, and Iran. Over time, these railway workers developed chains of solidarity that transcended the politics of the nation-states to which they belonged. Although many of the railways are classified and therefore prohibited from filming, they emerge as somewhat of a protagonist in the film—the titular semi-autonomous ‘state within a state,’ historically an instrument of colonisation, now being used to turn the tables on the oppressors.

SCENES OF EXTRACTION
Sanaz Sohrabi / 2023 / Canada/Iran / 43’ / English and Farsi with English subtitles 

In the second part of her ongoing trilogy on British petrocolonialism in Iran—following the acclaimed One Image, Two Acts (2020)—Iranian filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi delves deeper into the declassified photographic archives of British Petroleum to uncover haunting stories of labour exploitation, ecological devastation, and extractivism, focussing specifically on the role railroads played within the larger colonial infrastructures. The screening of this work is intended to engage with the industrial heritage of the Midlands, as well as the British Petroleum archives housed at the University of Warwick.

The screening will be accompanied by a panel discussion, featuring guest curators, invited panellists, and filmmakers.

A larger context for this screening is provided through an online programme, hosted by Screening Rights in collaboration with the Birmingham-based arts initiative Grand Union, titled ONE’S CONNECTION IS ANOTHER’S DIVISION: COLONIAL INFRASTRUCTURES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AND PALESTINE, featuring Sebastia Disagreement by Yiru Qian and A Passage by Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari.

Tekla Aslanishvili is an artist, filmmaker and essayist whose works emerge at the intersection of infrastructural design, history and geopolitics.

Sanaz Sohrabi is an artist, filmmaker and essayist whose work investigates the impermanence and malleability of historical records and narratives.