GFF: The Host

While investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known as BP), Miranda Pennell comes across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s, who would later embark on a search for the origins of civilisation. The film sets out on its own exploration, to decipher signs from the fragmented images buried in the BP archive. Interweaving stories drawn both from personal memory and from the records of an imperial history, Pennell gradually builds a picture of a 20th century colonial encounter. The Host is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by – and their consequences.