Petroleum companies play a fundamental role in shaping imaginaries of the modern world in general, and the Middle East in particular. From bitumen used to develop the first photographs in 1827, to petrol that sends camera crews to locations around the world, and petrochemicals used to treat celluloid, the history of cinema is a history of oil. At the same time, histories of oil and cinema are embedded in histories of imperial power. In order to understand how the politics of petroleum shape knowledge production about postcolonial modernity in oil producing countries in the Middle East, this paper examines the history of documentary filmmaking by British petroleum companies in Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. At the same time that Hollywood's cinematic imaginaries of the so-called Orient reproduced cultural stereotypes about lecherous Arab oil sheikhs, petroleum companies circulated "factual" films to impress mainstream audiences with images of oil modernity in the Middle East. Driven by the emergence of the public relations industry in Britain, these petroleum companies circulated some of the earliest moving images of modern cities in oil-producing countries to mass audiences across the region and throughout Europe. While Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s earliest films were produced to impress stockholders and staff, by the 1950s the Iraq Petroleum Company was employing Arab film crews to make Arabic language films screened in theaters ahead of features in Iraq. This shift signified a critical change in how images of oil modernity circulated as part of public consciousness and popular discourse. This paper is based on my analysis of oil company public relations office documents, film production records, film publicity archives, and documentary films sponsored by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iraq Petroleum Company and the Kuwait Oil Company. The various gendered representation of built environments and bodies is central to my interpretation of the films’ engagement with contemporary discourses of nation building. I show how petroleum company films depicted oil infrastructure, urban architecture, and women’s bodies as key sites where visible evidence of modernization in oil-producing countries was determined. British petroleum companies put cinema’s dialectic power to both educate and entertain to work as a means to legitimate colonial practices of extraction as fundamental to postcolonial nation building in oil-producing countries of the Middle East.