Direct Action

Winner of the Berlinale’s Encounters Award for Best Film, this bold and vital documentary explores the militant activist community in France.

A stirring portrait of the radical protest movement in France, Direct Action takes us inside the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a 1650-hectare, 150-person rural commune of militant activists, squatters, anarchists and farmers. Deemed ‘eco-terrorists’ by the government, the group is at the forefront of high-profile campaigning and lobbying in the country, staging successful interventions against major construction projects, battling violent police crackdowns and giving rise to a new ecological revolution.

Working in close collaboration with their subjects over a period of two years, Guillaume Cailleau and co-director Ben Russell (Good Luck, MIFF 2018; A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, MIFF 2014) have crafted an immersive, observational documentary that unfolds across 41 long takes, allowing the audience to experience a collective’s vision as it responds to both the day-to-day realities of community as well as to crisis. The result is a bracing, expansive film, one that asks pointed questions about the efficacy of direct political agitation – and the role of cinema in transforming rhetoric into action.

“A superlative example of [a] daring kind of filmmaking … It insistently compels its viewer to consider the relationship between form and content.” – Film Comment