Bringing The ZAD Back Home: Episode Two

The Cinema Committee returns for a second installment on La ZAD, or the Zone to Defend. To watch the first episode, go here.

In the days since our first episode was released, the situation at the ZAD has considerably altered. 40 official forms for registered projects have been turned into the local prefecture, allowing these arbitrary squares of land to remain with the “Zadists.” This decision was clearly not an easy one, and it remains to be seen what will happen to the projects that did not fill out an official form or that ones that don’t qualify for legality. There is a vital distinction between a compromise and choice, a distinction we hope can prevent future internal conflict. At the very least, the ZAD will largely remain what it has become over the past years. Despite any imposed legality, nothing can change what the ZAD is.

Naomi Klein has recently taken to Twitter in defense of these glorious 4,000 acres and referred to it as a “model” of resistance. Unlike the struggle against the Greek goldmine depicted in her film This Changes Everything, the diversity of tactics that won the ZAD cannot be edited out of any footage. The level of resistance achieved on the ZAD has finally transcended the perennial “single issue struggle” and ushered in the future many of us have been waiting for.

As the Invisible Committee explains in their recent book Now:

“The ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes illustrates what the process of fragmentation of the territory can signify. For a territorial state as ancient as the French state, that a portion of ground is torn away from national continuum and brought into secession on a lasting basis, amply proves that the continuum no longer exists as it did in the past. Such a thing would have been unimaginable under de Gaulle, Clemenceau, or Napoleon. Back then, they would have sent the infantry to settle the matter. Now, a police operation is called “Caesar,” and it beats a retreat in the face of a woodland guerrilla response. The fact that on the outskirts of the Zone, buses of the National Front could be assaulted on a freeway in the style of a stage-coach attack, more or less like a police car posted to a banlieue intersection to surveil a camera that was surveilling “dealers” got itself torched by a Molotov cocktail, indicates that things have indeed become a little like the Far West in this country. The process of fragmentation of the national territory, at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, far from constituting a detachment from the world, has only multiplied the most unexpected circulations, some far-ranging and others occurring close to home. To the point that one tells oneself the best proof that extraterrestrials don’t exist is that they haven’t gotten in touch with the ZAD.”

Our latest episode concerns April 11, 2018, the third day of the police assault on the ZAD. It is composed from several primary sources and cycles back and forth throughout that long battle where the tide began to turn against the French Republic. It borrows its title from the Russian science-fiction story “Roadside Picnic” where the first incarnation of the Zone was depicted. We wish our friends and comrades at the ZAD the best of luck in the coming days. What they have accomplished is truly miraculous and we can only hope to honor them by bringing this struggle to our homes.