Direct Action Review: An Inspiring, Engaging Exploration of Community Living

      Note: This review was initially published as part of our coverage for the 2024 Berlinale. Direct Action will be released in theaters on April 11.

      In northwestern France, a stretch of land has been engaged in a struggle against the threat of complete destruction for the past sixty years. Plans for a new international airport began to emerge over Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a rural commune located a few miles from Nantes, in the 1960s. Since then, farmers who were evicted refused to abandon their land and came together to reclaim it. This led to the establishment of the ZAD (Zone to Defend) as local residents and activists transformed the reclaimed land into an autonomous community. In 2012, then-Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault declared, "The airport will happen." However, it did not. Governments from both the left and right attempted to evict the squatters, often with considerable force; during a significant eviction campaign in April 2018, police reportedly deployed around 8,000 tear gas canisters and 3,000 stun grenades each day. Nevertheless, the ZAD endured, emerging as a successful model of communal living—a 21st-century heterotopia—drawing attention from both law enforcement and the media. Since its inception, journalists and filmmakers have sought to explore its dynamics, creating a body of short films, documentaries, and television exposés that often tread the fine line between voyeurism and cheap entertainment. In a landscape oversaturated with visuals, what more is there to reveal, and how?

      Directed by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, Direct Action is a unique documentary that appears to coexist with the individuals and location it portrays, allowing the ZADists’ focus on egalitarian concepts of power to shape its filmmaking. Unlike many other attempts to highlight this 4,000-acre community that adopt a top-down perspective, predominantly emphasizing its contentious interactions with authorities, this film takes an alternative approach—filming alongside rather than against, avoiding simple sensationalism in favor of a more profound and illuminating exploration. It's not as though violence and mistreatment are overlooked; the film opens and closes with graphic scenes of police brutality, beginning with footage from the late-2010s evictions and concluding with clashes in March 2023 between law enforcement and members of the Earth Uprisings Collective. However, Cailleau and Russell, reuniting after their short Austerity Measures—a depiction of a neighborhood in Athens during the 2011 anti-austerity protests—are pursuing something markedly different. The looming threat of eviction hovers over Direct Action like a Damoclean sword, yet it is not the film's binding element; the cinematic interest and the source of its cumulative power reside elsewhere.

      The real focus, despite the title, isn’t on political action as a mere concept, but represents a broad category of daily activities within the ZAD, which the filmmakers observe over an extended three-and-a-half-hour runtime with a blend of awe and respect. We see individuals plowing fields, baking bread, cooking meals for one another, planting seeds, caring for horses and pigs, and constructing and refurbishing homes—in total, Cailleau and Russell spent three months between 2022 and 2023 filming and documenting life in the ZAD. Therefore, at a fundamental level, Direct Action is concerned with labor: the challenges of hard work and the oddly mesmerizing allure that arises from repetitive practices. Unlike documentaries that portray the monotonous toil of life under capitalism, this film exudes a genuine sense of creative vitality. There is no hint of automatism in the multitude of actions depicted; every endeavor, be it operating a sawmill or making crepes, feels freshly discovered and invented in front of the camera.

      This vitality can be attributed in part to the fact that the individuals we see, or catch glimpses of, have had to learn their own tasks. (The ZADists’ apprehension of police brutality might explain the film's efforts to maintain their anonymity, focusing on hands and employing only first names in the credits.) The directors' attempts to avoid simplistic back-to-the-land narratives are quite refreshing. Direct Action presents the ZAD as a lively environment, yet Cailleau and Russell do not romanticize it as an idyllic paradise. The project attuned to the exhilarating freedom derived from an alternative lifestyle is equally mindful of the limitations and flaws—hence the focus on errors, on work that does not go well or fails entirely.

      However, another reason for the film's energetic aura lies less in the actions themselves and more in how the directors document them. Entirely shot on Super 16mm and consisting of static shots averaging around five minutes in duration, Direct Action uses time as a structural principle. If the film centers on work, it also emphasizes the duration required to accomplish it, to refine and perfect one’s craft. Cailleau and Russell appear to view space as an aggregation of