BEK presents a screening of Marwa Arsanios’ film “Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III – Micro Resistencias”, as part of The Nordic Labor Film Festival (NLFF)
Published
In Colombia’s Tolima region, women share their struggle to preserve Indigenous knowledge and agricultural traditions. Amid conflicts over land, natural resources, and forced displacement, seeds, and the right to cultivate them, stand as symbols of both resistance and autonomy.
Saturday
September 20. 13:30 – 14:00
Det Akademiske Kvarter, Bergen
Free entry and open for all
Marwa Arsanios: Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III – Micro Resistencias (2020)
Duration: 30 min
Language: English and Spanish, with english subtitles.
The film series “Who is Afraid of Ideology?” portrays women who join forces to anti-colonial battles against capitalist exploitation. In places such as Northern Syria and Colombia, women assert the right to land and to reconnect with nature, where self-defense, autonomy, collectivity, indigenous resistance, land rights and seed protection define the common ground of women resisting extractivist industries.
In Part 3: Micro Resistencias, the filmmaker Marwa Arsanios focuses on the region of Tolima, one of Colombia’s main coffee-producing areas. The film draws our attention to several stories of women. They speak about their struggle to preserve the ancestral knowledge of their indigenous communities. This knowledge is rooted in the cultivation and protection of seeds, which allow them to maintain a degree of agricultural autonomy. The problematic issues of land ownership, the distribution of natural resources, forced displacement and murder also evoke the exploitation and violence to which the inhabitants of this region have been subjected. The voices of these testimonies are interwoven with landscapes, portraits, sounds, and the seed cultivation at the core of the film. Multiple temporalities deliberately intersect, expressed through the desynchronization of different scenes.
The narrative approaches different forms of speech: like text, interviews, confidences and songs, while the images vary between still shots, moving shots and travelling shots. In this way the materiality of the film is made obvious for the viewer, as both the recording situation and the camera are made visible and present within the work.
Marwa Arsanios
Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose work can take the form of installation, performance and moving image. She reconsiders the political development of the second half of the twentieth century from a contemporary perspective, focusing on gender relations, collectivism, urbanism and industrialization. Her research work includes many disciplines and is deployed in numerous collaborative projects.
Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work, most recent: Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023); Mosaïc Rooms, London (2022) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021), as well as Documenta 15, Kassel (2022) and 11th Berlin Biennale (2020).
The Nordic Labor Film Festival (NLFF)
The Nordic Labor Film Festival (NLFF) was started in 2017 by the film collective RåFilm in Malmo, Sweden. The festival in Bergen, Norway is organized by the film collective dotLeft.
Nordic Labour Film Festival is not a regular film festival. We are a meeting point for labour film in the Nordic region as well as a platform for a new workers’ movement. In focus are, beyond labour film, conversations and activities for learning, for finding new visions and for organising.
Image: The Nordic Labor Film Festival (NLFF) 2025