While investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP), filmmaker Miranda Pennell came across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s, who would later embark on a search for the origins of civilisation.
Setting out on its own exploration to decipher signs from the fragmented images buried in the BP archive, The Host interweaves stories drawn from both personal memory and from the records of an imperial history.
Pennell’s immensely compelling film is about the stories we tell, the facts and fictions we live by – and their consequences.