WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?
PART 4 REVERSE SHOT

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. First, with the domination of empires (Ottoman, French) over colonised peoples, with their laws, but also the domination of human beings over the earth. And moving forward with the abolition hypothesis, how do we restore a common reality? How do we break the chain of property? Marwa Arsanios uses this opportunity to imagine renewed connections with the earth, all life forms included. It is all about images, then, and viewpoint, as suggested by the handheld camera, as a starting point for a new perception, stripped of any kind of anthropocentrism. Similarly, the digital images at the beginning and the end of the film are like brackets allowing that disruption in the usual workings of the world and in our thought. It is also about History itself, considered from another perspective, and about the openings and opportunities offered by its reverse angle, as the title suggests. (Nicolas Feodoroff)