Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben

Wednesday, April 2, 2025, 7:00 pm

Direct Action

by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell

THE LAB

2948 16th Street

San Francisco, CA 94103

Presented in association with The Lab
Admission: $15 General / $12 Cinematheque Members
Event tickets here
Download Program Note

Filmmaker Ben Russell in person
PLEASE NOTE 7PM START TIME FOR THIS SCREENING

For over two decades, US-born, Marseille-based filmmaker Ben Russell (US, b. 1976) has been creating film and video works which manifest unexpected intersections between ethnographic documentary and psychedelic experience. In his first Bay Area appearance since 2010, Russell appears in person to present Direct Action (2024, co-directed with occasional collaborator Guillaume Cailleau), a 3.5 hour Super-16mm “structuralist militant non-fiction film” on contemporary French eco-activism. 

SCREENING:
Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell; digital video, color, sound, 216 minutes. Exhibition file from the makers.

On Direct Action: In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France. From 2022–2023, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (Zone à défendre; zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement—culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.

This work springs forth from a much larger moment of climate anxiety, cultural struggle, political uncertainty, and increasingly dark optimism. By choosing the ZAD as our subject in the period after its struggle was victorious, it was our intention to bear witness to a viable artistic, intellectual, communal, civic and social path forward through the ecological crisis. Little did we know that a new ecological movement—Les Soulevements de la Terre—would bubble up from the surface of the ZAD during this time, exploding into the present and redefining what was to come.

Ben Russell had relocated to France from Los Angeles in 2019 and, given his long-standing inquiry into the utopian possibilities of collective living, […] he was quickly drawn to the ZAD as both a conceptual and physical site. He contacted his friend/collaborator Guillaume Cailleau, a French filmmaker and producer based in Berlin, about collaborating on a film at the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Guillaume had grown up in the rural environment of Western France and had maintained a keen interest in examining systems of production and resistance; his answer was a quick and resounding yes.

It was on our first visit to the ZAD that we found a diverse collection of political thinkers, utopian dreamers, militant hardliners, organic dairy farmers and kids of all ages spread across a swath of forest and farmland in the rough shape of an airport that was never built. While the occupied land of the ZAD is fairly modest as landscape, to be present at any point on the ZAD is to be physically aware of the alternative timeline that development proposes: had the airport been realized, the collective bakery would be a gift shop, the dense birch and oak forest a runway. The wetland populations of great crested newts would no longer exist and the week-long symposium of radical bakers would never have taken place. In the context of this particular resistance movement, all minor points become major.

In order to gain access to this community of 10+ collectives and individuals, it was necessary to make bimonthly visits of 1–2 weeks over the course of a year. These visits involved eating and sleeping on-site and working alongside members of the ZAD as they cut wood, weed community gardens, destroy walls and bake bread. It was important to be present in the ZAD in order to feel the time of the ZAD and, given the ZAD’s critical relationship to media representation and its over-saturation during the peak moments of 2012 and 2018, it was essential to move slowly and deliberately in working alongside this diverse group. As filmmakers, we have always understood that form and content are directly aligned and, because of this, it felt especially exciting to be working with a population for whom action and ideology are inextricable. Utopia is necessarily a common cause and cinema is one of the best places for it to be realized—a time that is always arriving, always present, always receding. For these reasons, cinema is the best vehicle for interrogating, presenting, and recreating the ZADist utopia into a model for living in-and- through the environmental uncertainty of Right Now. (Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell)

For more background and information on the Direct Action project and on ZAD, please access the Direct Action Press Kit here.