Who's Afraid of Ideology? (Marwa Arsanios, 2019) (Patreon)

Beginning with a woman thumbing through a notebook of pressed plants, detailing the ailments that can be cured with each one, Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 soon becomes wider in scope, exploring the broader connections between people and the land. In this case, Arsanios is offering the viewer a portrait of Jinwar, a new village coming into being in the Kurdish territory of Syria. What makes this village unique is that is that it will be an all-woman community, based primarily in agriculture but also having women pulling double- and even triple-duty in order to fulfill all the necessary occupations to keep the village thriving. Interstitially, Arsanios pulls away to tell us about the complications that befall Kurds with respect to land rights, and the uncomfortable but necessary cooperation with the Assad regime’s clerks to ascertain who owns what property in the confusion of the post-war period.

As topical and interesting as Ideology’s subject may be, there is very little formal innovation in it, or at least in Part 2. What is strange is that, in Part 1, Arsanios spends 18 minutes exploring the philosophical and theoretical connections between human beings and nature – the humanist notion the earth is a space we merely occupy, versus more radical-materialist ecological concepts of stewardship and connectedness. In addition, she manipulates the sound / image relationship, denaturalizing cinematic realism. This prologue certainly complicates the straightforward quality of Part 2. Why the festival couldn’t find the time to program the whole thing is rather mysterious. Maybe someone is afraid of ideology after all.