Direct Action

After the cancellation of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport, the filmmakers immersed themselves in the ZAD community (Zone à Défendre, or 'Zone to Defend') between 2022 and 2023. Observing daily life, collective labour and resistance, the film traces how a local struggle grows into a wider ecological movement, culminating in renewed confrontation with the French state at Sainte-Soline.

Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell: 'This work springs from our own relationship to climate anxiety, cultural struggle, political uncertainty, and increasingly dark optimism. After the ZAD's victorious struggle against the state-run airport expansion project in 2018, we began this film hoping to bear witness to a viable path through the ecological crisis. Little did we know that a new ecological movement — Les Soulèvements de la Terre — would surface from the ZAD, exploding into the present and redefining what was to come.

In visiting the ZAD, we both found a diverse collection of thinkers, dreamers, militant hardliners, organic dairy farmers and kids of all ages spread across forest and farmland in the approximate shape of an airport that was never built. The modesty of the land occupied by the ZAD offered an understated vision of an alternative timeline to neo-liberal development [...] In resistance, the minor is the major. To access this community, we made bimonthly visits of 10 days over the course of 14 months. We lived with and worked alongside the ZADists as they cut wood, weeded gardens, tore down walls, and planned "disarmament" actions. We worked to align form with content — finding direct inspiration in a community for whom action and ideology are inseparable. In time, we understood utopia to be a common cause and cinema the ideal place to realise it; the vehicle by which we can interrogate, present, and recreate utopia as a model for living in the environmental uncertainty of Right Now.’

— Excerpted from the 2025 Official Catalogue, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF), 2025.