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For over two decades, US-born, Marseille-based filmmaker Ben Russell (US, b. 1976) has been creating film and video works which manifest unexpected intersections between ethnographic documentary and psychedelic experience. In his first Bay Area appearance since 2010, Russell appears in person to present Direct Action (2024, co-directed with occasional collaborator Guillaume Cailleau), a 3.5 hour Super-16mm “structuralist militant non-fiction film” on contemporary French eco-activism. Filmmaker Ben Russell will be present in-person.

SCREENING:

Direct Action (2024) by Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell; digital video, color, sound, 216 minutes. Exhibition file from the makers.

On Direct Action: 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 à défendre; 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.