My Name Is Oil

The film gives an oil rig a voice. Alone in the sea, the machinery that pulls fuel from the earth senses a coming catastrophe and tries to warn the people around it. Nobody tunes in to that frequency: everyone is busy with the business of extraction.

Igor Smola works from the philosophy of Reza Negarestani, where oil is not a resource but a living thing that carries the remains of the dead and feels the disaster set off by one small, overlooked detail. It is not an eco-sermon. It is a shift of who gets to speak.

At Sheffield DocFest the film played in the strand about perception beyond the visible, the only film there about the ecological crisis. Fourteen minutes, so it fits a single class or a single programme slot, and it opens straight into a conversation about extraction and its cost.