Crossings : Kaleh Ziyarat, Crossings : Kaleh Ziyarat

Everything began with a chance encounter in a currency exchange shop in North York, in the suburbs of Toronto, in 2021. My mother is a pensioner, and because Iranian banks are cut off from the global financial system due to sanctions, she relies on informal financial networks to access her pension from Canada.

One day I went with her. During a friendly exchange, the owner casually asked whether we wanted the hawala to go through Kuwait or Georgia. I asked what the difference was. She laughed and said there was not much difference in cost or timing, but that sometimes the Kuwaiti route was settled through sheep, which were smuggled and sold in order to clear the transaction.

I was completely taken by the strange geographical intimacy of this story. A pension payment in Toronto was suddenly connected to sheep moving across the Caspian basin, the ports of the Persian Gulf, the coast of Oman and a whole set of financial and logistical systems that were totally out of sight. I tried to ask more, but she became reluctant to explain the details. That refusal also stayed with me.

Over the following years, I became obsessed with this story and dedicated my doctoral dissertation in geography to the study of how these sheep move, and how informal exchange networks make that movement possible. When I began my long-term fieldwork in the Strait of Hormuz and the Azerbaijani borderlands, I took my camera with me. At first, filming was a way of observing these movements and the landscapes they produced, but over time the footage became more central and the film grew out of that process.

Throughout this project I kept returning to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Storyteller, where he describes the landed tiller and the seafaring trader as two archaic figures of storytelling. This became an important structure for the film. I imagined the narration as a conversation between a grounded voice, attached to pastoral fields, borders and overland routes; and a transhistorical ‘sea entity’ that carries memories of movement.

This ‘sea entity’ gradually became the speedboat propeller that appears throughout the animated sequences. I imagined it as a witness that has moved through different times and geographies. While writing its prose and poems, I was also thinking about Benjamin’s angel of history. For me, the propeller became a maritime translation of that figure but instead of flying above history, it churns within it.

Much of the narration also comes directly from my fieldnotes. Many passages are drawn from observations, conversations and stories I encountered in Khasab, Oman, and Astara, Azerbaijan. I think the poetic quality of the text came from trying to stay close to the texture of what I was actually hearing and seeing.

The writing also continues a process that began in an earlier novel I published in 2021, a series of stories around the geopolitics of the Strait of Hormuz and the Portuguese presence there. The narration in the film extends that method of working through archival fragments and invented voices.

The diversity of techniques came from two impulses. The first has to do with the kind of cinema I love and the moving-image practice I come from. I am interested in forms that do not treat documentary footage as the sole approach to depicting a geography. Animation, special effects and staged vocal registers all became ways to address the complex poetics and politics of this place. The Society of Geographers of Lisbon, for example, is an important architectural and historical space in the film, but I did not want to film it simply as an institution or archive. I wanted to make it unstable, to transform it into a crisis-stricken vessel that gradually begins to sink.

The second reason was more practical. I did not have formal permission to film in many of the places I wanted to film. So special effects and non-documentary images became a way to circumvent these limits and visually acknowledge  them in the film as well. 

This is a very important question, because I did not have official permits to film from any state actors. The local authorities, especially people within the environmental protection office, knew that I was living in Khasab as a geographical researcher, but every attempt to secure formal permission for research or filming led nowhere.

So access became a long negotiation between myself and non-state actors. I lived in Khasab for nearly four months, and during that time I spent a lot of time in the everyday spaces where informal workers gathered, rested, ate, waited and exchanged stories. Slowly, through these spaces of social reproduction, I became friends with people who were involved in different parts of the trade. Although they have to remain anonymous, many of them were genuinely interested in the film and in what I was trying to say through it. They understood that I was not there to expose individuals, but to write about a whole world of movement and labour that is usually only described through the language of criminality.

My interlocutors helped me enormously. They absorbed me, to some degree, into the informal systems that allowed me to see and film things that would have been impossible to access otherwise. But this also meant that filming was never straightforward. It required constant negotiation and improvisation. Since I could not simply enter the port and travel with the speedboats, for example, I had to go out into international waters and rendezvous with the speedboats only to return to the port together. The port had a rule that between sunrise and sunset it was open to all vessels, so if I arrived from international waters during that window, I could exist there legally for that period. Interestingly, I also used a version of this legal loophole another time when I arrived in Khasab’s port aboard the cruise ship that appears in the film. 

But none of this made the work fully safe. Eventually, I was deported after being interrogated by intelligence officers at the border. They believed I was a journalist looking into the labour conditions of informal workers, which is an issue that is very tightly controlled in the gulf countries.

As a geographer, I had been visiting the library of the Society for years, but it only became important to the film when I began looking more closely at its history. Founded in 1875, at a moment when European powers were competing over the exploitation of the African continent, the Society was a place where geography became a practical tool for dispossession and colonial planning.

One figure I became interested in was Luciano Cordeiro, one of the Society’s founders and the author of Batalhas da Índia: Como se Perdeu Ormuz. The book looks at the conditions that led to the recapture of Hormuz by the Persians in 1622. What struck me was how contemporary some of his observations felt. He writes about the difficulty, almost the impossibility, of controlling trade along those coasts through taxation, patrols and military power. People refused to submit neatly to imperial customs regimes, preferring to pay bribes and continue trading, despite the danger of being targeted as smugglers or pirates.That resonated deeply with my own research. The historical conditions are different, but the “problem” of Hormuz remains strangely persistent. 

The opera came from my different but related interest in the history of modern opera as a form that offered European audiences orientalist geographical imaginations. I wanted to work with that history, but turn it against itself. In the film, opera becomes a tool to reflect on the violence, tumult and unfinished life of colonial geographical thinking. The soprano’s voice moves through the wreckage of the sinking Society, almost like Benjamin’s angel of history, looking back at what is accumulated while being pushed toward the inevitably of future crises.

Yes, in a way it is a snub, or maybe more precisely, a counter-conference. I wanted to complicate the troubled history of geography as a discipline that has for long been entangled with imperial power, extraction and control. In this film, I was interested in what happens when that history is brought into conversation with anthropology, human geography and various forms of studying borders from below.

This is why Shahram’s lecture takes place inside the eerily empty halls of the Society where all its colonial history becomes a kind of silent audience. He speaks about smuggling and arbitrage simply as yet another form of spatial practice and a way of moving through and sometimes against the dominant global trade order. I liked the reversal of roles whereby instead of presenting another imperial conference about piracy and security along trade corridors, the Society is made to listen to a lecture about trade from below.

Shahram is also a dear friend, and his work has been very important to my thinking. Together with Mahmoud Keshavarz, he edited Seeing Like a Smuggler, which became an important resource for me as the film’s vision took shape. The lecture in the film is largely inspired by that book, but I wanted to bring it into conversation with the archival material I stumbled upon at the British National Archives. These were a series of understudied folios from the 1940s, where confiscated passports from regional traders sat beside interrogation notes and anxious telegrams about the need to exert imperial control over the Strait of Hormuz. I was struck by the intimacy of those documents; and Shahram’s virtual presence allowed me to create a bridge between his theories around border-thinking and my own fieldwork.  

Most of the film looks at smuggling from below, following non-state actors. But Hormuz, as we know too well by now, is also shaped by powerful state actors with competing ambitions. I wanted the end of the film to open onto that other scale of opacity.

The explosion at Bandar Abbas port was a tragic and devastating event that deeply shook the Iranian society. Most reliable reports investigating the cause of the explosion point to the presence of missile propellant chemicals that were improperly stored inside the port. Of course, the Islamic regime continues to deny that perchlorate materials were involved, but this denial has to be read within a longer history of concealment, censorship and logistical opacity common to their functioning. The disaster killed dozens of people, injured more than a thousand and left many families searching for missing relatives in the aftermath.

For me, this event was important because it reversed the usual moral framing of smuggling. In Bandar Abbas, smuggling, concealed paperwork, improper storage and route manipulation appeared at a much more sinister scale, carried out by the sovereign state itself. So in the film, the explosion creates an epistemic rupture. It shows that the Strait of Hormuz is not only a space of small-scale informal exchanges, but also a space where smuggling meets intense militarisation, sovereign secrecy and covert logistics.

This is a very difficult question for me to answer, because the violence is still so fresh. I think we will have to wait and see how the situation evolves before fully understanding what this closure has set in motion. I also do not want to speak about it too quickly, or only through the abstract language of geopolitics, because the pain of this moment is very real.

But one small lesson I have learned from studying these corridors for years is that in these seascapes, one thing seems to persist and that is the continuity of movement and exchange in the face of extreme blockades, barriers and violence. This does not mean movement is easy, or innocent, or without loss. It means that regardless of the conditions, people will find ways to continue living, trading, communicating, loving, sending money, carrying foodstuffs and moving animals across the water. Cultural, material, romantic and economic exchanges do not simply stop because a state, or in this case multiple states with conflicting neo-imperial ambitions, declare a closure.

Since the dawn of post-medieval trade regimes and the first colonial encounters, the Strait of Hormuz has had a troubled and violent history. But each time, the ingenuity of people living along these coasts has produced new forms of passage. If need be, people always become the infrastructures that make movement possible as a condition of survival for themselves and their communities.

So today, in the shadow of this dark moment in the history of the region, I hope my film can be a reminder that Hormuz is not only a chokepoint in global trade or a military flashpoint. It is also a lived and living seascape. It is continually made and remade by people and non-human agents.

Kaleh Ziyarat is a Persian word that literally translates to “Cape Visitation.” It is the cartographic title of a rocky cliff, named after an ancient shrine, that marks the point where the Sea of Oman is separated from the Persian Gulf. Historically, in European hydrographic maps, this point in the Strait was marked as the place where the Persian Gulf and the so-called Pirate Coast began. Today, it remains an important landmark for the speedboats that make the night crossing across the Strait. Before sunrise, they gather near this point and wait patiently for permission to enter the port of Khasab and unload their cargo.

For me, Kaleh Ziyarat is something between a cartographic threshold and a waiting point. It is a place where older geographical imaginations of danger and piracy overlap with the present-day pulse of informal trade.