French-Lebanese filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm joins us to present his La Défense trilogy—screening in all three parts for the first time—which unfolds like a series of enigmatic Greek tragedies across Paris’s brutalist La Défense business district. Constructed atop razed shantytowns and farmlands in the 1960s, it becomes a site for Noujaïm to reflect more broadly on the histories of France’s othered minorities who have been effaced or otherwise neglected by state structures.
Blending documentary, narrative, and genre throughout, the films freely course through past, present, and disquieting futures. Pacific Club is an elegy to the titular nightclub, which operated in the basement level of La Défense and became the city’s first nightlife venue to cater to Arab patrons, most of whom were children of immigrants from the nearby suburbs. Through oral history, the film honors Pacific Club as a haven to a marginalized generation in the 1980s amid the heroin and AIDS epidemics and the electoral rise of the anti-immigrant National Front. To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion, the trilogy’s second chapter, stars Kayije Kagame (of Alice Diop’s Saint Omer) as a Black businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper from her own steely office tower—until a neo-noir fugue awakens fantasies of revolt and destruction inside of her. The final volume, Demons to Diamonds, stages the starkest vision of alienation to take hold of the glassy skyline, portraying a society on the brink of collapse rocked by surveillance and paranoia during an uncanny wave of suicides. While Noujaïm’s work mines the shadows of the city for stories of tenderness and resistance, the trilogy also makes a case that “destruction may be the only chance for rebirth.” As Denis Lavant, the ghostly antihero of Demons to Diamonds, proclaims, “I’m destroying the Pantheon, so that everything can begin anew.”
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Noujaïm, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.
Pacific Club. 2023. France/Qatar. With Azedine Benabdelmouene, Taos Bertrand, Julien Mezence. 16 min.
To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion. 2024. France. With Kayije Kagame. 14 min. New York premiere
Demons to Diamonds. 2025. France/Canada/Switzerland/Italy/Qatar. With Kayije Kagame, Denis Lavant, Félix Maritaud. 29 min. New York premiere. Commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel in partnership with The Vega Foundation and Lo Schermo dell’Arte