Film archive, 2024

Direct Action

Director Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

A space physically occupied by French activist group the ZAD, who oppose environmental destruction. The film captures fragments of the self-suffcient 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.