THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Fixed shot of an improbable lighthouse in the middle of a bocage. Here is one of the first images of Direct ActionFrenchman Guillaume Cailleau and American Ben Russell. Filmed from a low angle, the elegant wood and metal building takes on the appearance of a giant under the blue sky: it is located exactly where the control tower of Notre-Dame-des airport was to be built. -Landes (Loire-Atlantique), a project launched in the 1960s with a view to relieving congestion in the city of Nantes – which is located around twenty kilometers away.
We know the rest of the history of this area, renamed “zone to defend” or ZAD, by activists opposed to the airport: after intense clashes, Emmanuel Macron's prime minister, Edouard Philippe, announced in January 2018 the abandonment of the project “division airport”.
Peasant rituals
This disobedient lighthouse, which returns three times in the montage, acts as a totem in this hypnotic documentary, organized according to a succession of fixed shots – Direct Action has toured festivals since its selection at the Berlinale. For more than a year, between 2022 and 2023, the two filmmakers set up their 16 mm camera in the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, still inhabited by various collectives who live there independently, working the land while leading militant activities.
Because the fight continues, particularly within the Les Uprisings of the Earth movement, created in 2021, a network of activists coordinating various local struggles (against the Castres-Toulouse motorway project, or in opposition to megabasins, these water reservoirs artificial plants used for irrigation of agricultural land). In total, around 150 people took over this vast place – as big as an airport, that goes without saying.
Direct Action reveals the little-known side of this territory, with its peasant rituals, carried out to the rhythm of the seasons: working the land with a plow horse, kneading bread dough, in an abstraction of pale colors, weeding tasks for maintenance floors, etc. So many activities that could not have developed if the airport had been built.
This is the brilliant idea of the film, to articulate the visible (the present of the ZAD, day to day) and the invisible (the airport which will not rise from the ground). The spectators are free to construct “their” film: instead of this garden where a white-maned horse takes the air, there would have been, who knows, a souvenir shop; and this path that the cows take with their calves, in the spring, perhaps corresponded to the route of a landing strip (a moving sequence with two elderly breeders, a man and a woman, waiting like young parents for a nap in the grass of newborns bellowing…).
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