For billions of years, it lay beneath the earth, but overnight its energy released a breathtaking techno-cultural leap: the discovery of oil brought growth in its wake that has threatened to destroy the very basis of life. 
Against the backdrop of a world deprived of oil – the twenty-second century – this feature describes an era that changed the face of the earth as no other has done.

In 1974, as a direct consequence of the first oil crisis, feature maker Peter Leonhard Braun travelled to the eerie global centres where oil is extracted, processed and sold. His sound recordings testify to the gigantic dimensions of this machinery and its industrial omnipotence.

Oil reconstructs a time driven by belief in progress and male megalomania, a short sprint in human history whose abrupt end was programmed from the outset.