The Price of Oil (2019)

Project Description:

The Price of Oil is a 20-minute experimental animation that reimagines archival materials from both digital and print sources. As an exercise in archiveology, the film is the product of over a year of archival research, utilizing curated imagery, stop-motion techniques, and programming within video editing software to create a haunting reflection on interconnected systems of disaster, labor, and exploitation.

The film is accompanied by a music piece composed by American composer Frederic Rzewski in 1980 and performed by the Buffalo-based music collective Wooden Cities. Inspired by the contemporary tragedy of the Alexander Kielland, a floating oil-drilling platform that capsized in the North Sea, killing 139 workers, the music underscores the film’s narrative tension.

The animation revolves around two distinct yet interconnected characters: an oil dealer in the Rotterdam market and a worker/survivor of the Kielland disaster. While the two characters never meet, their lives form “complementary parts of a superstructure,” as Rzewski describes it—one governed by forces of greed and need. Caught in a tragic design beyond their control, their juxtaposition reveals the systemic relationships that bind economic desire to human vulnerability. Through its inventive use of animation, archival imagery, and music, The Price of Oil reflects on labor, exploitation, and the devastating human cost of industrial systems, offering a visually and sonically rich meditation on tragedy and interdependence.

directed by Mani Mehrvarz
animation by Maryam Muliaee
music by Frederic Rzewski
performed by Wooden Cities