Direct Action

Followed by a talk with Guillaume Cailleau, Ben Russell

In Direct Action, Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell turn their camera toward the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a self-organised territory born from resistance to state-led development. Rather than explaining or historicising the struggle, the film inhabits its duration: assemblies unfold in real time, hands work the soil, gestures of care and conflict circulate within a fragile collective ecology.

Taking its title from the protest tactic it evokes, Direct Action reframes militancy not as spectacle, but as daily practice — as the slow labour of sustaining alternative forms of living together. Through long takes and an attentive, embodied camerawork, Cailleau and Russell craft a cinema of presence, where resistance is measured not only in confrontation, but in persistence. (Bethan Hughes)