ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the amateur films shot by the employers of the Italian national oil company ENI in Iran between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. At the centre of geopolitical and economic interests, Iran was one of the sites where the Italian company looked for oil, signing agreements with the local government. Several teams of geologists and geophysics worked there at the time, and together with maps and different tools they also brought amateur cameras that they used to shoot at least eighty short films, now preserved in the company’s archive. The chapter discusses these films and how they came to be, at the intersection of sponsored, amateur, ethnographic, and travel cinema.
