Special mention for the Best Documentary Prize at the last Berlin Film Festival, but also awarded the Best Film Prize in the Encounters section, “Direct Action” is a film which deliberately takes its time (around 3h35 in total) to bear witness to the mechanisms of social struggle, and to move away from them by showing how a community can become one, beyond, in its mode of organization as, for some, of life, facing a State which has no response other than repression and surveillance. Ending with the attempt of one of the last governments to dissolve the association Les Uprisings of the Earth, the film tells us. immerse first with some archive images from the demonstrations and clashes of 2018 at Notre Dame des Landes, before plunging us into the life of a community until a central intermission, a deliberately innocuous shot on a local path in the rain, where the carcass of a vehicle Opening the second part on the fight against the mega basin of Sainte-Soline, the film then focuses on the organization of a protest likely to be repeated in other places.
Particularly interesting, the first part first dissects police interrogations through an exchange on the quicksand strategy, then takes us into another rhythm of life, thereby challenging the frantic one imposed on us by the modern world. We thus discover a number of professions, using ways of doing things that seem from another time (work horse for plowing, collecting Colorado potato beetles, blacksmithing, etc.) but implicitly showing the creation of an ecosystem of its own, even if no mention is made here of the question of renouncing certain elements of a modern way of life. The second part focuses on the way of organizing the fight against projects which are ecological absurdity, and in mirroring the incapacity of public authorities for dialogue, pointing above all to the means of repression implemented against to citizen resistance.
Regrettably refraining from ever questioning equality before taxes, the need for projects of general interest, nor the limits of a model of self-sufficiency on the scale of a population or territories with necessarily limited resources, “Direct Action” however hits the mark in the way of showing the eagerness to monitor or repress rather than to dialogue, thus confining the opponents to physical resistance. So, even if the film is not exempt from length (15 minutes of kneading of flour, two rounds of 9 pancake makers instead of just one…) and could have benefited from 45 minutes less in order to reach a wider audience, “Direct Action” nonetheless achieves its goal of showing that 'others models can exist, while constituting a formidable basis for debate.
Olivier BachelardSend a message to the editor
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