I’ve Heard Stories

A prospective wish is announced at the very beginning: "Imagine a land without ownership". Ownership? Since when? How? Where? With which implications? This is what Marwa Arsanios endeavours to discover in the fourth part of her meticulous ongoing project whose generic title is Who Is Afraid of Ideology? After documenting feminist experiments of community autonomy in Lebanon, Kurdistan and Syria (Who Is Afraid of Ideology? I&II, FID 2019), Marwa Arsanios ventures a hypothesis in the form of speculative fiction, from a remote piece of land in Lebanon, a cut in a stone quarry. In this small piece of land, a few sidekicks make that postulate, and slowly share stories of domination and exploitation. This land has a complicated administrative, legal, geological and biological history. (Nicolas Feodoroff - FIDMarseille)

A video that uses the history of a magazine – Cairo’s Al-Hilal ‘50s and ‘60s collection – as the starting point for an inquiry into Jamila Bouhired, the Algerian freedom fighter. An actress designated to play her role is showing the magazine’s covers to the camera. From the different representations of Jamila in cinema to her assimilation and promotion through the magazine, the performance attempts to look at the history of socialist projects in Egypt, anti-colonial wars in Algeria, and the way they have promoted and marginalized feminist projects. The clear gender division used to marginalize women from the public sphere was overcome for a short moment during the Algerian war of independence (Jamila becoming its icon). Different voices and film and print material are used to explore this history. What does it mean to play the role of the freedom fighter? What does it mean to become an icon?

Marwa Arsanios’s new film examines the structures of self-governance and knowledge production fostered by the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement. She asks: what kinds of democracies are enabled without a state, and what kind of ecology is produced under the conditions of war? A propositional portrait of guerrilla ethics, Who is afraid of ideology? Part I disassembles the traditional documentary format, not only to show the contradictions inherent in such a portrayal, but also to doubt the regime of transparency.

Inspired by these intense exhanges and images partially filmed in the South of Tolima in Columbia. The final film of the trilogy focuses on the current systemic war led by transnational firms against the tiniest and most essential aspect of life: seeds.

A generous and lyrical continuation of Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios’ interest in the ties between ecology, feminism, and collective organization, this documentary showcases the radical politics of a Lebanese farming cooperative and the citizens of Jinwar, a women-only village in the north of Syria.