JM How did the project and your collaboration together begin?

GC The project began with Ben being curious about this commune in France that had been victorious in its struggle against the building of the airport, which is quite rare. We have already worked together; we made a short film together [Austerity Measures, 2012] and I produced two of Ben’s films: Good Luck [2017] and Color-Blind [2019]. When Ben first contacted me and asked if I would produce this film, I said no. In France, this community has been documented a lot and I thought it had been in the media and the news too much. I also hadn’t known that it was still active. Then I realised that the ZAD is not really well known outside of France and that even in France many people, like me, think it has disappeared. We decided to go and see what was left of it. To begin with, we thought that I would produce the work and Ben would direct it. But once there we were just three people – the two of us and Bruno Auzet, the sound recordist – and we quickly became a fluid organism. At some point, we decided that it made no sense to have defined roles, as they were all blurred anyway. 

JM How has the ZAD functioned since the government’s cancellation of the airport project in 2018? 

BR There has been a pretty seismic shift in how things are there. Right after the project’s cancellation was announced there was another round of large-scale evictions where police came in and destroyed homes and kicked people out. In 2008 and 2009, when the ZAD began, a bunch of farmers who didn’t want to leave the area invited anarchists to squat in abandoned buildings and help them resist the airport’s construction. In 2018, the state said that now the area was legal again it would revert to how it was before and that people could stay only if they occupied structures that had already existed, although a lot of these structures have been destroyed by the state too. The government then tried to get this diverse group of leftists to legalise by proposing individual agricultural projects and capitalist endeavours, that would take place within each property. The people who decided to sign up got to stay and the people who decided not to sign, because they thought it was a betrayal of the ideology they’d set up, either left or had their houses destroyed by the state. It was pretty traumatic for a lot of the people, although as one older anarchist who’s living there told us: “Just because we’re signing something doesn’t mean we have to do it. It’s just another way for us to continue. If you don’t believe in the rules of power, then it doesn’t really matter if you sign a contract saying you do.” All of the details of this are a bit imprecise because neither Guillaume nor I had been to the ZAD before 2022. This complicated history was something that we heard and read about but never saw directly. Our experience there was with the people who had chosen to stay and who still believed in the broader possibilities of what the ZAD could become, not just as a site meant to resist an airport, but also as an idea of resistance. 

GC The community stays to protect the site as it is now, and because some people have lived there for over ten years now and don’t want to move, but also a place to welcome other struggles. Soulèvements de la Terre, one of the biggest ecological movements in France, started up partly in this place. 

JM The pace of the film is slow and great attention is paid to physical labour. Is slow filmmaking a political decision? And how does it connect to your subject matter? 

GC The film’s content informs its form. One of the things happening in the film is the idea of degrowth and slowing down consumption in general, but we also thought a lot about the consumption of images and how to propose a different viewing experience. Slowing down was a very important part of it in proposing an experience, not just a film you get information from. We both believe that it’s not what you get to see or hear that is important, but how you can experience or feel it. 

BR To my mind, most filmmaking or art-making is just trying to find a rationale for pleasure or desire, and I really like making long shots and spending time with people. I believe that one of cinema’s most useful functions is to produce a time-space that an audience can cohabitate with. That doesn’t mean it has to be long – I’ve also made films that have shots that are three frames long and have a different register – but I think that the way you use time in cinema needs to be aligned with the subject. As Guillaume says, the kind of time that we encountered at the ZAD was the kind of time that we reproduced within the film. 

GC After you spend six hours gardening, a 10-minute shot is nothing. To do a one-minute shot would have been a bit ridiculous. 

JM The film is structured in two parts: the social and working life of the ZAD and then the protest against the “mégabassine” development in Sainte-Soline and its aftermath. How are they connected? 

GC The ZAD has been kept as a place to prepare for and organise other struggles, and one of the things happening when we were there was organising this demonstration against water appropriation. When we arrived at this moment in the film’s production it felt clear that the ZAD was not simply a geographical territory, it was also more like a political mindset. People come and go from this place and expand, other ZADs are growing in different places. So it felt natural that we should go to Sainte-Soline because somehow it would have been a misrepresentation of the whole idea of making a portrait not to have this more active demonstration or more visible struggle. 

BR It was happening in a similar kind of terrain, on agricultural land, and there were a lot of parallels between what folks in the ZAD had experienced and what happened at Sainte-Soline. Topographically, it’s not an inhabited zone, but it is a place that has been misused by the state. At Sainte-Soline, there were between 10,000 and 15,000 protesters and 3,000 cops who fired something like 5,000 tear gas grenades in one hour. It all took place on somebody’s farmland, so when most protesters and the cops left, people stayed behind to pick up all the tear-gas grenades. When we first got to the ZAD and took a tour through the forest, folks noted that they still came across tear-gas grenades in the forest from the evictions in 2012 and 2018 and told us it was somebody’s job to pick them up and to remove these traces of state violence. 

JM  The level of violence used by riot police in Sainte-Soline is shocking – it feels like a war. What was it like filming it? 

GC It was a war. The police were using weapons against civilians.

BR You see all the material that we shot. It was such a precarious situation and such an unpleasant one that I really didn’t feel comfortable filming much. When we were filming the last sequence it was hard to imagine how it could be used in a film because of how often images of protestors resisting state violence are used to discredit them. But, when we saw all the material and understood it within this longer schema it was clear how it could work. 

GC It also felt a bit stupid to be filming because we had all this equipment, so we couldn’t run fast. It was traumatising to spend that time there. It was shocking to see the state put the lives of civilians in danger to defend private property. 

JM There’s a moment where one of the protestors turns to the camera and shouts, “This isn’t what you should be filming.” I thought that was an interesting provocation because in some ways the project of non-fiction filmmaking is to bear witness. 

BR I mean that was the reason to go, right? The function of portraiture is to produce a representation of a subject that you can’t access otherwise. The fact that you can experience somebody else’s time in your own time is where a lot of the power lies in cinema. The question of urgency is one of the places where we understood a misalignment between militant-activist cinema or activism in cinema because Sainte-Soline is now over. The demonstration happened over a year ago, in March 2023. If there was any way our film could have served as a testament or been utilised in some political way, that moment has long since passed. Most of the stuff that came out of that situation was made more quickly and had a different function. Our role is to point to the thing as an event, but also as an idea that exists for longer in time. There were so many other people with cameras at Sainte-Soline that we didn’t feel exceptional, which was very different from how we felt when we were filming at the ZAD, where we were very visible and people understood who we were and what we were doing. The weight of those images lies in the fact that they’re filmed in such a different way than most of the kinds of images that come out of those spaces. 

JM Residents of the ZAD described how the level of force used by French police has increased since the Gilets Jaunes protests between 2018 and 2020. Throughout the film, the threat of state violence looms. Does this affect life in the ZAD? 

BR It didn’t feel like it was on the horizon because the ZAD itself isn’t active any more. Of course, the police still come – the guy who made the drones was raided a week before we first got there. I would say the threat of violence feels less than the very clear and constant surveillance of the people there. 

GC Which is a kind of violence. 

BR It’s not physical violence, but rather being reminded constantly that you’re a subject of the state. Most people on the ZAD have a terrorist notice in their passport, so when they travel they’re stopped at borders and held for long periods of time. It’s the same mark that’s given to suspected members of Islamic State. When we first arrived we initially felt like people were paranoid; then we realised that they’re not. 

GC You have a lot of helicopters going around. You have a lot of police crossing the area for no specific reason. You feel under pressure all the time. They live semi-legally so their houses can be destroyed any day without them knowing why. 

JM Why is it important for the state to make such a show of force over this community? 

BR You can count the number of autonomous zones that have successfully existed in established nation-states on one hand. It’s a real embarrassment to the centralisation of national power to have a group of people saying, “No, you can’t come here.” The ZADists were not quiet – the weekend after the first eviction attempt in 2012, 40,000 people showed up to protest on their behalf. It reminds me of why George Bush started the war with Iraq, to avenge his father against Saddam Hussein. It’s a petty response, but it’s serious. People on the right in France really hate the ZAD and feel it’s their duty to destroy it. 

GC It’s the most established example, but every other week or month there are new places trying to create a similar situation, so it’s also important to hit hard the successful one to discourage others.

JM The ZAD began as a response to a localised issue. Over the course of the film, we see how its reverberations spread across the country; one resident describes it as the “ephemeral centre of French politics”. What does the existence of the ZAD say about the present moment in France? 

GC The political situation is very difficult right now and is pushing toward the right. The government we have is terribly right-wing and didn’t get voted for; most people voted for the left in the last election for the parliament. The whole political situation is very strange. People got very engaged in politics and then their vote didn’t count for anything, so now they’re trying to find new ways of organising. 

BR I’ve lived in Marseille for five years, but didn’t know anything about the ZAD before coming to France. What often cripples internationally minded political or ecological movements is the idea that the world is too much to deal with. You’re taking on everything instead of taking on things locally. The strength of the ZAD, and the anti-mégabassine protests, is that they’re local projects, but their success sets an example for other people involved in other projects. It’s also in keeping with the history of protest and political agency in France: people turn out and things change or there’s a response, like what happened with the Gilets Jaunes. It makes sense to consider the ZAD the ephemeral centre of politics because it points toward the possibility of organising in a moment when possibility seems foreclosed. It’s much easier to give in to the fact that the world is fucked and that there’s nothing that any of us can do.

JM How have audiences outside of France responded to the film? 

BR In places that have local movements – which is everywhere – people from those movements who’ve come to see the film feel emboldened, seen and hopeful. I think people who aren’t involved in activism come to the film with a bit more scepticism but are also often quite taken by the portrayal. It was important for us to make a film that was positive, not that that was our strategy, but I think the model of the ZAD is so important that it was important also to do service to it in our portrait of it. 

GC Every country has a different audience. When we organise a screening we usually propose that local activists come to join the screening to give a platform for local struggles. We’re not just there to watch a film, we’re there to do something together and watching a film is part of it. In Ghent, for example, people came and put banners in the cinema. Afterwards, we spoke about a local struggle about a piece of forest being destroyed to build a parking lot for buses. Those people had just lost the first battle and were really eager to share their experience and the public coming to see the film were very curious and were invited to join the demonstration the next day. I think the ZAD resonates in places where people need hope and ideas. They will have to adapt them of course but the ZAD is not meant to be a model – it’s a model in the making. The people there don’t think they’ve found the right solution. Every day they consider what they’re doing and look for new ideas. I think that this is maybe the most important thing, not how we do things but the fact that we can always change and adapt things..