Free City Radio
Tuesday June 10th, 2025 with Stefan Christoff
268, Filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell on Direct Action

This edition of Free City Radio features a conversation with the filmmakers behind the project "Direct Action." Filmmakers Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell speak on a film that has been described this way: "Direct action is a tactical strategy of protest that seeks to achieve an end directly and by the most effective means. DIRECT ACTION is a contemporary portrait of one of the most high-profile militant activist communities in France: a 150-person strong rural collective that successfully resisted an international airport expansion project in 2018, created an autonomous zone between 2012 and 2018, survived multiple violent eviction attempts by the French state and spawned a new ecological movement in 2021. Using a collaborative and immersive observational approach, the film documents the everyday lives of a diverse ecosystem of activists, squatters, anarchists, farmers and those labelled by the government as “eco-terrorists”. Can the success of a radical protest movement offer a path through the climate crisis?" This interview program is supported in 2025 by the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University. Also thank you to Cinema Politica through which in my work with the organization I originally encountered the film DIRECT ACTION. The music track is Passage by Anarchist Mountains. The accompanying image is : Direct Action directors at St Soline, by Geoffrey Rodriguez.