A French filmmaker Guillaume Cailleau met co-director Ben Russell in the Exarchia district of Athens in 2011. They have since worked on projects in Serbia, Polynesia and Suriname, but Direct Action is about Cailleau’s home country. The 22-minute documentary covers, at a meditative pace, the life of a militant community of activists, farmers, anarchists and “eco-terrorists” who have been defending the fragile ecosystem of the marshes in northwestern France against the construction of a regional airport for more than 20 years.
“We knew the locals had strong political views, but that’s not what we were looking for. We were interested in everyday activities such as planting garlic, chopping wood and others. We shot one take per day on 16mm film,” explained the French director about the best film of this year’s Encounters, the second competition of the Berlin film festival, speaking at Drahomíra Cinema. Their goal was to authentically portray the life of the community rather than popularise it. “We gathered ten hours of footage, three and a half hours making it to the final cut. We focused on individual shots, and once selected, didn’t alter them in any way to show only the reality. There are only forty cuts in the entire film,” said the director.
