Petrolia

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years. Shooting on 16mm film, using time-lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena - the toxic beauty of the refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg, and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow's harbour. Benedict Drew has created the soundtrack for the film using purely electronic, computer-generated sound that works on the threshold between silence and noise, just as the image works on the threshold between the visible and invisible.