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DIRECT ACTION (Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, 2024)

In Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell’s documentary feature DIRECT ACTION, the viewer is dropped into the Notre-Dame-des-Landes commune, one of the most controversial ZAD (Zone à Défendre, or Zone to Defend) communities in France. Known for their success in combating certain high-profile government initiatives—particularly a long-gestating airport-expansion project that was finally halted in 2018—this 150-plus-person eco-activist collective established the 4,000-acre area as an autonomous zone for a number of years in the 2010s, while resisting multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state.

Traumatic events notwithstanding, daily life in the commune is relatively peaceful, even quaint—a far cry from the way the group is portrayed in the media. Across 41 mostly static shots totaling 212 minutes (and featuring an intermission), longtime collaborators Russell and Cailleau—an American and a Frenchman, respectively, and both fixtures in the world of contemporary artists’ cinema—depict the workaday routines of those living in the ZAD. Whether they’re cooking, farming, building, or parenting, it’s clear that these individuals, despite their anonymity (no full names are given, and few faces are seen), are uniquely attuned to their surroundings and the self-sustaining economy that they’ve built outside traditional capitalist strictures. Shooting in Super 16mm, the co-directors capture these activities in an observational manner befitting both the unhurried pace of the environment and the lineage of verité cinema, which they simultaneously aspire to and comment upon through a rigorous formal approach that highlights the presence and perspective of the filmmakers.

As DIRECT ACTION proceeds, the more literal implications of its title become apparent. In bits and pieces, we learn that a march is being planned to protest the construction of a nearby reservoir—a seemingly innocuous act that ultimately ends in bloodshed and serious injury. In this catastrophic confrontation—since dubbed the Battle of Sainte-Soline—thousands of activists were met by an army of police officers who tear-gassed the protesters into submission. In a remarkable succession of scenes, Russell and Cailleau document the rally and eventual escalation of violence in vigorous detail; over the course of an extended denouement, the rugged beauty of the environment—glimpsed most spectacularly in a breathtaking mid-film drone shot—turns a terrifying shade of gray, with clouds of smoke filling the landscape as objects are hurled and bodies collide in the middle distance. More effectively than any recent documentary—or even any fictional war film, which in these moments DIRECT ACTION most closely resembles—these scenes present a troubling look at state-sanctioned violence and the lengths to which governments go to protect private interests. As a portrait of a place, DIRECT ACTION is vivid and illuminating; as a document of a movement and a moment, it’s something else entirely—something powerful, even crucial.

A couple of days before DIRECT ACTION won the Encounters Best Film prize at the 2024 Berlinale, I met up with Russell and Cailleau to discuss their time spent in the ZAD and how it influenced the film’s radical construction.

Can you tell me about the origins of DIRECT ACTION and how you two first decided to collaborate on the project? 

Ben Russell: DIRECT ACTION started as a film that I was directing and Guillaume was producing. It was something we were going to try to do pretty quickly, because of the way the funding came together through the Jeonju Cinema Project, which mandates finishing films within a year. We ended up getting less money than expected, and decided that we needed to take more time to make the film, both economically and logistically. We wound up going to the ZAD every two months or so for 10 days at a time—just myself, Guillaume, and our sound recordist, Bruno Auzet. We spent around 100 days there total, and at a certain point, given the framework of the place and how power circulates (or doesn’t circulate) within an anarchist space—and just because of the fact that we were doing everything together: I was setting up the camera and the shots, but found myself increasingly in consultation with Guillaume—it became more and more of a proper collaboration.

What initially drew you to the ZAD, and how familiar were you with its history before traveling there?

Guillaume Cailleau: I grew up in the region, and I studied in Nantes, next to the site of the airport project. My son’s godfather lived in a collective with a few people from the ZAD, and he opened up many doors. He gave us direct contact with people.

Russell: I’ve had a long-standing interest in collectives and communes, and in the general idea of living with a group of people. Filmmaking has been one way to search for models of doing this myself, but I hadn’t found those models yet. Anyway, I was living in Marseille and teaching in a film school in the north of France during the second year of the pandemic, and they had commissioned a work from me. It was impossible to travel, and very hard to make films with large groups of people, so I began looking locally for the right subject. At some point, I heard about a group of anarchists who had been victorious in their battle against the state. It seemed great, and was described as a sort of rural commune.

But then I actually saw a documentary about the ZAD, and there was a white guy with dreadlocks playing with some juggling sticks, and I was like, “There’s no fucking way I can make a movie in this place.” [Laughs] But I watched a bit more and talked to some more people, and I began to feel that the idea of victory was very compelling, because there are so few recent instances of leftist organizations being clearly successful in this way. I mean, they formed an autonomous zone for six years! It’s crazy. So we put together the proposal, and it seemed like something we could do.

How did you come to the idea to depict the community in a mostly observational manner, and for much of the film to include very little contextual information? 

Cailleau: One of the first ideas was to make an expansive portrait of everything that was happening in the ZAD, which is not really possible because it’s too many things—with too many people.

Russell: From the beginning, we were decidedly more enthusiastic about making a film that took place in the present, to think about the present and the future, to not spend so much time in the past . . . The film places the viewer in a certain space with a certain community, and it’s our job as filmmakers to provide clues as to what it means to be there and how it feels.

What’s incredible about being in the ZAD is that if the government’s plans had worked, then everything you see in the film would have been an airport. Like, everything: no cows, no bread, no forge. The ZADists had to occupy the land in order to keep it from being transformed into an international airport—a project that, in turn, would have allowed the city of Nantes to expand exponentially. By resisting the airport, they kept the city planners from being able to transform the city. This is why there was so much opposition from the French government to this project. It wasn’t just about an airport—it was about power and land use and business interests, and all these other things.

What were the conversations like with the community members whom you were filming? Did you explain the observational nature of the project, and how your approach might be different from how other filmmakers have documented them in the past?

Cailleau: There were a lot of conversations. We decided early on that we would participate in the activities in order to understand them properly and also to get close to people. So when you see the shots of buckets, for example, it’s because we were spending the whole morning collecting potato beetles by hand and drowning them in those buckets to avoid using pesticides. We were working and doing our film at the same time.

Russell: A lot of the collectives have spaces to house visitors, so we would show up at the ZAD and live on-site, and we would eat collective meals twice a day. We would clean, cook, and do the dishes. Every Wednesday there was collective gardening, and we would go to work in the field in order to bring vegetables back to our host collective. Even if you’re visiting, you’re assumed to be a participant. This practice made sense to us as we tried to understand who was on the ZAD and what the place was—because it’s virtually the size of an airport, and there are over 150 inhabitants living there at any time. There are people in groups and alone; there’s a guy who has lived with his cat in a tent in the woods for a decade. There are spaces where you’re not allowed to bring in cars or motors, which means that there are a lot of different levels of engagement.

Can you describe some of the political diversity you encountered?

Russell: Everybody’s radically left, but you have anarchists and—who were the ones that live in the forest?

Cailleau: Paleo-anarchists.

Russell: Yeah. And people who believe in selling things as a way to build support for the organization; people who don’t believe in making money off of what they produce, who prefer to give it away as mutual aid. There are people who believe in the right to not work. There are people who believe that collectives need to be organized in really distinct and clear ways. But I would say that the determining feature is that everybody is on the left—the far left. And everybody is participating in this larger conceit, because it’s a choice to be there, and it’s not an easy place to live.

Cailleau: It’s what the woman says at the end of the movie when she speaks about the variety or diversity of gestures. She’s referring to the demonstration itself, but it applies also in the collectives—they have many ways of working, and everybody together works better.

When you first began shooting, did you already have a conception of the structure or length of the film?

Russell: We lied early on when we knew it was going to be long. We were like, “Yeah, it’ll be like 80 or 90 minutes.” [Laughs] But the film wanted to be long. And the formal decision that we made early on about how to film—to put the camera on a tripod and let time move through it—meant that duration would be a defining feature. We knew that it would be a long feature, and that it might also be a multi-channel installation, as I’m always thinking about how to get time to happen simultaneously.

How did you come to the decision to focus mostly on filming hands and bodies rather than faces?

Cailleau: One answer is that some people didn’t want us to show their faces. So we had to come up with a different strategy sometimes. It also helped diffuse the idea of the individual a little bit. We’re talking about a collective, so we don’t want to meet too many faces.

Russell: Another answer has simply to do with visual pleasure. For me it’s great to watch the film and to still be very excited about the shots. As a filmmaker, I always try to make images that I like—like the bread scene. To be able to spend time looking at the hands of a former professional breakdancer who started his own restaurant, failed at it, became radicalized, and joined the Gilets Jaunes [Yellow Vest protesters]—then decided they weren’t radical enough and moved to the ZAD, and is now making bread. The interest for the ZADists in watching the film also lies in understanding what their neighbors do, because most people hadn’t seen each other do these things at such close range.

Regarding the drone shot: did you feel like you needed to open up the space for the viewer in a way? 

Russell: It’s a flat territory, so it’s hard to show the land while being on it. We weren’t interested in instrumentalizing the drone, but one of the ways that we went about filming was by trying to really think about the action and activity that people were involved in at all levels. We tried to find intellectual work and creative work, and early on we met a guy who builds drones. Once you understand that the ZAD has a militant history, then you can maybe interpolate that building drones had a somewhat different function at some point. This is the case with all of the activities; none of them have only a single function. Nobody is just making bread. Instead, they’re making bread every Wednesday morning for everybody on the ZAD to have it—not for free, but as “pay-what-you-want.” Just as the people working in the garden are getting food for their collectives, another guy is making 600 crepes every Friday because he’s part of a collective that sells crepes to raise money for the cause. Everything has another level to it.

Cailleau: There was also a lot of pleasure in the idea of having a sky shot in a place that was supposed to be an airport. [Laughs]

Did you try to spend a specific amount of time filming each activity we see in the film?

Russell: We tried to do one shot a day. It’s a bit ambitious to do more, because it takes so long to get to a place and set up, even if we weren’t using lights. With very few exceptions, we never shot things from the same position.

At what point did you realize that the group was going to stage this action?

Russell: The “Soulèvements de la Terre” [Earth Uprisings Collective] movement had started before we arrived, and had already been active in other actions, including one at a different reservoir in Sainte-Soline—so we knew that it existed.

Cailleau: We had been invited to another action, which we never really knew much about, so we didn’t go. But it was building up. For a long time, we thought we wanted to focus only on the ZAD, but at some point it was clear that the ZAD is not only a geographical place. It’s also composed of the people who come through it, who are organized there, and who do other things outside the ZAD. That’s why we finally decided to go to this demonstration.

Russell: By that point we knew a lot of the people who were involved in the movement. And it felt important, also, for us to understand what and how it was to be there.

Cailleau: Someone said to me that the film feels like it’s showing itself being made. That’s why we deviated, and accepted the invitation to the demonstration. Because that’s the thing we were doing—following what was going on.

Can you walk me through the experience of filming the demonstration and eventual confrontation with the police? You can see that at one point you’re using a zoom lens, but it still must’ve been intense.

Russell: We knew people who were participating in the protest, and had about as good a general idea of what might happen and what the schedule of events was as everybody else who was going there. However, I was not excited to film. I don’t know if you were excited, Guillaume?

Cailleau: No, not really. No.

Were you expecting this type of clash? 

Cailleau: Nobody expected this sort of clash.

Russell: We would tell people we were bringing our camera, and they would respond, “Well, I hope you can run with it.” Bringing a big Super 16mm camera didn’t seem like a really intelligent thing to do—I mean, the camera isn’t super-heavy, but it’s a pain in the ass to carry. We were also committed to the structure of making fixed long shots, and this meant that we had to know what we wanted to shoot, so that we could be there before things happened. In the protest, we decided to follow the wooden structure that represented a bird.

Cailleau: It represents an Outarde canepetière [little bustard], a bird [categorized as near-threatened] that nests in the region and has become a symbol in the fight against the huge water reservoir. Filming at the protest was quite similar to the earlier shots in terms of being very focused in the moment, seeing what’s going to happen. The difference is that we were also quite stressed about having a tear-gas bomb explode on us, or on the camera.

Russell: I stupidly wasn’t worried about myself, but I was concerned about bringing our sound recordist into the situation. This was a film that Guillaume and I conceived, and we were the ones who wanted to do it, and while Bruno had been in situations like that before and seemed cool with it, it was hard not to feel responsibility for the people you’re working with.

I was also quite worried that I would enjoy filming the protest—and I felt very glad that I didn’t like it at all. It was terrible. There were 3,000 police officers who fired 4,000 tear-gas bombs at around 30,000 protesters. Two hundred people were injured, two people were put in comas. It was fucking crazy. It felt like World War I trench warfare. As I was filming it, I was also thinking about Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line (1970)—the experimental film where a rural field is fully occluded by fog. I was looking through the lens and then I couldn’t see anything. I thought that my goggles or the lens had fogged up, and I looked up and I couldn’t see anything. It was enough tear gas to fill an entire field.

It’s still crazy for me to watch the final shot in that sequence: somebody throws a Molotov cocktail that explodes around the cops. In David Graeber’s book Direct Action, someone says, “You know, we don’t really worry about throwing Molotovs at cops, because they’re all wearing fire-retardant material.” This means that the cops are not going to get hurt—that the Molotov is more of a gesture. But all of this is happening in the shot, and there’s a photographer probably three feet away from the cops. It was all so violent—which is the thing that I was worried about enjoying. I wanted to be as far away as felt safe, but close enough to be near the event.

What was the end result of everything?

Russell: A similar protest had already happened previously in Sainte-Soline, where protesters had entered a water catchment site and damaged the basin, or reservoir—essentially an empty hole. They cut some plastic cables and broke some pipes—nothing major. In the language of the movement, they call this disarmament, which I think is a great term. It was because of the success of that first action that there were so many cops at the second one. And the cop response was very surprising to everybody. The Gilets Jaunes protests had been happening for a long time already, so the French public was accustomed to seeing a certain level of police violence, but to see it in farmland deployed against a really diverse group of activists was quite a shock. While the cops successfully defended the reservoir from the protesters, the action was not considered a failure because it brought attention to the ongoing mégabassine project. The state has since canceled 12 or more of these projects as a direct result of the action at Sainte-Soline, so what the protestors wanted to happen has happened.

Cailleau: But at the same time, the state is still bringing charges against the individuals who are said to have organized these demonstrations. They even started referring to the protesters as “ecoterrorists.”

Russell: The ZAD has been a constant thorn in the side of the government, which is one of the reasons why they legally dissolved Les Soulèvements de la Terre immediately after this protest. This is what they’re speaking about in the press conference in the film, a press conference that happened three days after the anti-terrorist police raided the ZAD at four in the morning to arrest folks that they thought were members of the organization. The dissolution was appealed and the organization “undissolved”; actions are continuing and the movement seems to be gaining strength.

The last thing I wanted to ask about pertains to the title of the film. Obviously it relates to the direct action taken by the collective. But is it safe to say there’s a double meaning as it relates to the direct-cinema tradition?

Russell: Yeah, definitely. We’re not activists; we’re making films. We’re making films that are really invested in both the subject and the way in which the subject becomes a subject in front of the camera. It felt like we were engaged in a kind of direct cinema—the construction of the film is super-frontal, and the sound is quite direct. I liked thinking about Frederick Wiseman while making this film—for the way that his cinema verité feels, in spite of or because of the fact that there’s always a camera crew present on the other side of the frame.

I don’t believe in the idea of documentaries as non-constructed events, and I like that everything in our film is very clear—and I also like that it includes us and you in its construction. You’re presented with the thing as it’s happening, and what it means is an understanding that you can only arrive at through the time of the film, by being with the film. I can’t think of anything more direct than that.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. In addition to his work for Film Comment, he is a regular contributor to Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, and more. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.