Meezan

Filmmaker Shahab Mihandoust’s 16mm-shot portrait of the fishing industry in Iran’s Khuzestan province—home to Abadan, the first oil company town in the Middle East and a site of mass destruction and migration during the Iran-Iraq War—is at once an immersive process film about labor and a rich, sensorial account of a former combat zone reorganized by decades of industrialization. Across three distinct chapters, an inquisitive camera and intricately detailed sound design (by Ernst Karel) closely attend to both the individual and collective in the environments that dictate daily life and the scale of production operating along the margins of a petro-capitalist landscape: from the fishermen trawling Abadan’s temperamental coast, to an arduous bartering system on a Bahrain wharf, to a remote shrimp processing-packaging plant operated by women shuttled in from nearby villages. Winner of the 2023 Montreal International Documentary Festival New Vision Award.