This relationship with time is one of the particularities of this documentary directed by Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell. Between 2022 and 2023, they immersed themselves in the heart of this still inhabited ZAD, after the abandonment in 2018 of the project to build an airport, a few dozen kilometers from Nantes.
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The goal of the directors? “Show something else”, underlines Xavier Le Falher, offer another look at the Zadists, too often reduced to images of clashes with the police, in the television format. What the directors, who come from contemporary art, set out to show is “the society built” around this fight against the airport. Without voice-over, without editing, the documentary shows this life on the margins through peaceful sequence shots, of varying length: political discussion, chess game, workshop for children, screen printing, a man kneading bread dough for ten minutes… “We are in a sort of ode to slowness, with people returning to a certain craft. We could almost believe ourselves in another era,” observes Xavier Le Falher. “A gesture of cinema” which “establishes another relationship with time, through beautiful images”.
It is not forbidden for spectators to get up during the screening, to leave the room for a few minutes: “The film can be watched in a very free way”, assures the programmer, the main thing being to show another side of this ZAD, and to provoke debate, or at least questions on the question of utopia, on the phrase “another world is possible”, which often comes up in the documentary, and on its extensions, since images of the struggle against megabasins in Sainte-Soline by the Earth Uprisings, a project born in the ZAD, are shown at the end of the documentary.
The Méliès is organizing a discussion around “Direct action” on Saturday November 30 (the documentary will only be screened twice): Saturday November 30 at 3:30 p.m. Presented by Sylvain Leder, economics associate and contributing journalist to Le Monde Diplomatique , author in 2023 of a survey on megabasins.
Screening followed by a meeting at Aquiu, (rue Carnot) hosted by Sylvain Leder: debate on social struggles and alternative experiences, in the presence of the local committee of Earth Uprisings (Pau), Extinction Rébellion Pau, Attac.
