Audiences may be surprised by feature documentary Direct Action (which had its world premiere in the Berlin Festival’s Encounters section earlier this week). Given the title, many will be expecting a rousing piece of fiery agit-prop.
After all, filmmakers Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau are following the work of ZAD (Zone To Defend), the anti-globalist environmental activist group that successfully stopped big business interests from building a new airport in the west of France.
Instead, Russell and Cailleau provide a quietly absorbing study of the lives of those within the community on the site in Notre-Dame-des-Landes where the airport was going to be built. They farm, they clean, they cook…and they prepare for future protests.
“I come from a conceptual art background and in that world, form and content are directly aligned…the thing that you are filming is the way that you are filming it. The main question for us was to find a radical form to match what was explicitly radical content,” US-born artist and filmmaker Russell explains the approach.
The aim was to show just how the people within the commune were living.
“Their relationship to authority and to the state is all in the strictest sense radical,” Russell points out. He also notes that there has been a huge amount of reportage and news stories about the group.
“The image of police brutality is maybe a bit too familiar…it felt quite clear to us that the subject was how this space happens and what it means to be in this space. From that position, it meant we chose to put the camera on a tripod and not move it…as much as we could be present and to show what that space is.”
French audiences who’ve seen the film have been “shocked” by its depth and detail. This was not how many of them envisaged the ZAD.
The film is full of shots of hands. These images capture the everyday work done in the community (making bread, cutting wood) but they also reflect the fact that many of the ZAD members didn’t want to be filmed – or were wary about having their faces on camera.
Cailleau calculates that the filmmakers spent around 100 days in the community. They’d spend 10-day stints there every couple of months.
“In terms of footage, we only accumulated 12 hours I think,” he says of the relatively sparse amount of material they came away with. They were shooting on Super 16mm.
The film may be three and half hours long but that’s around the same running time as Martin Scorsese’s Oscar contender Killers Of The Flower Moon. While 216 minutes may seem “like an impediment to viewing” for some, others will relish the sheer scope of its vision of the community.
“When we were there, we were sleeping on site and eating with people; [we were] contributing, cooking, cleaning, doing all of those things. We certainly weren’t members of the community but we were participants in it. All of the activities we showed were also activities we participated in prior to filming them,” Russell explains their methodology. “Our approach wasn’t based on reportage. It wasn’t based on journalism.”
“We usually shoot only once, every action,” Cailleau adds.
The co-directors weren’t interested in interviewing the activists. “From the beginning, we really felt it was more important to be with [them],” Russell says. “The fact that we came back so often and filmed so little really helped our cause. In between every trip, we would process our material and we would come back and show the rushes to the people we were working with. They didn’t know what the outcome would be but they knew what we were engaged in.”
The co-directors would always set up the frame in advance. “We explained to everyone what it would be and they could decide whether they wanted to be in it or not,” Cailleau states. They would never film anyone without permission.
The filmmakers’ intentions were straightforward. As Russell puts it, “the goal was to spend time with people we really admired and to spend time in a place that is mysterious, and to understand [it] for ourselves.”
Asked about their influences, the two directors acknowledge their admiration for the work of Jean Rouch, Robert Kramer, Sharon Lockhart, Frederick Wiseman, Peter Watkins and Chantal Akerman among others.
“Both of us are cinephiles and have our feet in experimental cinema as well as contemporary art,” Russell says. “I started by studying documentary work and have a pretty strong foundation in visual anthropology as well. So the films of Jean Rouch like Jaguar (1967) had a profound effect on me the first time I saw them. At the same time, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook Of The North (1922), when I watched it, I understood it as a construction, as a participatory act and not as a document per se.”
Direct Action was made through CaSk Films, the Berlin-based production company run by Cailleau. The co-producers were French outfit Volte. Sales are being handled by Shellac.
The co-directors have known each other for a long time. They worked together on Austerity Measures (2012), a short which looked at life in Athens during the anti-austerity protests. Cailleau went on to co-produce Russell’s 2017 mining documentary Good Luck, which screened in Locarno. He also co-produced Russell’s 2019 short, Color Blind, which likewise screened in Locarno.
Cailleau’s short film Laborat was a prize winner in Berlin in 2014.
The filmmakers are delighted that Direct Action was selected for the Berlinale 2024. “You’re never really sure if a work is going to find an audience or how it’s going to find it – and so it was really heartening to have it here at the Berlinale,” Russell says.
The response has been enthusiastic, they report. “We are surprised by how it touches many people in different ways, people who are more interested in art, people who are more militant, and people in between,” Cailleau ends.
