Direct Action
Clinton Street Theater
2522 SE Clinton Street
- Work Stills:
About This Screening
In January 2018, the construction of an airport in rural Notre-Dame-des-Landes was officially canceled, putting an end to years of resistance led by one of the most important activist communities in France.
From 2022-2023, filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell immersed themselves in the ZAD (zone-to-defend) to create a portrait of collective life in the years after this unprecedented success. The resulting work documents the transformation of a local struggle into a new ecological protest movement - culminating with the Battle of Sainte-Soline in March 2023, where an act of collective direct action against water privatization was again met by the brutality of State violence.
“As filmmakers, we have always understood that form and content are directly aligned and, because of this, it felt especially exciting to be working with a population for whom action and ideology are inextricable. Utopia is necessarily a common cause and cinema is one of the best places for it to be realized - a time that is always arriving, always present, always receding. For these reasons, cinema is the best vehicle for interrogating, presenting, and recreating the ZADist utopia into a model for living in-and through the environmental uncertainty of Right Now."
Program Details
Ben Russell will be in attendance!
Buy advance tickets at: https://cstpdx.com/event/direct-action-2024/
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Direct Action
Germany/France, 2024, Super 16mm, Color, 5.1, 3h36m
by Guillaume Cailleau + Ben Russell