DIRECT ACTION
- GERMANY, FRANCE, KOREA / 2024 / French, English, Arabic / Color / DCP / 212 min
Directors: Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell
Photography: Ben Russell
Editing: Ben Russell, Guillaume Cailleau
Sound: Rob Walker, Nicolas Becker, Bruno Auzet
Producer: Guillaume Cailleau
Co-producer: Michel Balagué
Production Company: CASK FILMS
Co-production Company: Volte Film
World Sales: Shellac
A space physically occupied by French activist group the ZAD, who oppose environmental destruction. The film captures fragments of the self-sufficient life in this community through lingering, extended shots: cutting timber, tilling the soil, baking bread, a child’s birthday celebrated in a garden, adults engaged in a game of chess. What may appear bucolic is, in fact, a form of direct resistance. The same hands that cultivate the land and knead the dough are those that clash with riot police in protests against water privatization, and those countless helping hands that pull their comrades out from trenches. (TS)
[Director’s Statement] This work springs from our own relationship to climate anxiety, cultural struggle, political uncertainty, and increasingly dark optimism. After the ZAD’s victorious struggle against the state-run airport expansion project in 2018, we began this film hoping to bear witness to a viable path through the ecological crisis. Little did we know that a new ecological movement—“Les Soulèvements de la Terre”— would surface from the ZAD, exploding into the present and redefining what was to come. Ben Russell’s interest in utopian living—Saramaccan villagers, underground music scenes, and Baltic communes—initially drew him to the ZAD. He contacted his friend and one-time collaborator Guillaume Cailleau, who had studied systems of production and resistance. In visiting the ZAD, we both found a diverse collection of thinkers, dreamers, militant hardliners, organic dairy farmers and kids of all ages spread across forest and farmland in the approximate shape of an airport that was never built. The modesty of the land occupied by the ZAD offered an understated vision of an alternative timeline to neo-liberal development: a collective bakery in place of an airport gift shop, a lighthouse where a control tower was planned, a birch and oak forest where a runway would’ve been. In lieu of passport control, we have wetlands for great crested newts, a radical baker symposium, a punk concert. In resistance, the minor is the major. To access this community, we made bimonthly visits of 10 days over the course of 14 months. We lived with and worked alongside the ZADists as they cut wood, weeded gardens, tore down walls, and planned “disarmament” actions. We worked to align form with content—finding direct inspiration in a community for whom action and ideology are inseparable. In time, we understood utopia to be a common cause and cinema the ideal place to realize it; the vehicle by which we can interrogate, present, and recreate utopia as a model for living in the environmental uncertainty of Right Now.
Guillaume CailleauBorn in 1978, the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker produces films with his own company CASK FILMS. His work explores new forms to address political and social issues. His films have screened at festivals including in Berlin, New York, Rotterdam and Edinburgh. His short film Laborat won a Silver Bear at the 2014 Berlinale.
Ben RussellArtist, filmmaker, curator born in the US in 1976, currently a resident at Villa Medici in Rome. His films are situated at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia and have been presented in museums and festivals worldwide since 2002.