La Défense-trilogien
La Défense-trilogien – films from Paris’s business district
Like enigmatic Greek tragedies from Paris’s business district of La Défense
French-Lebanese filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm has set his trilogy in La Défense, the brutalist business district in Paris built on cleared slums and farmland in the 1960s. The area becomes a starting point for exploring the histories of minorities that the French state has erased or overlooked. The films blend documentary, fiction and genre cinema, moving freely between the past, present and unsettling futures.
Pacific Club is an elegy for the nightclub in the basement beneath La Défense. It was the city’s first nightlife venue for an Arab audience, and a refuge for immigrant children from the suburbs in the 1980s. In To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion, Kayije Kagame (Saint Omer) plays a Black businesswoman in a chilly office tower, where a neo-noir dream state stirs fantasies of revolt and destruction. The darkest part, Demons to Diamonds, depicts a society marked by surveillance and paranoia, on the brink of collapse as a wave of suicides spreads.
The trilogy searches for tenderness and resistance in the city’s shadows, but also suggests that destruction can be a path to rebirth. As Denis Lavant puts it in Demons to Diamonds: «I destroy the Panthéon, so everything can begin again.»
The films will be followed by a conversation with Noujaïm.
Valentin Noujaïm is a French-Lebanese artist and filmmaker who studied screenwriting at La Fémis in Paris. In film and installation, he combines fiction, documentary and archival material to explore political, social and architectural collapse. La Défense-trilogien has been shown at, among others, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, CPH:DOX and IFFR, and at Kunsthalle Basel, where he held his first institutional solo exhibition in 2025.
Pacific Club France/Qatar 2023 With: Azedine Benabdelmouene, Taos Bertrand and Julien Mezence 16 min.
To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion France 2024 With: Kayije Kagame 14 min
Demons to Diamonds France/Canada/Switzerland/Italy/Qatar 2025 With: Kayije Kagame, Denis Lavant and Félix Maritaud 29 min. Commissioned by Kunsthalle Basel in collaboration with The Vega Foundation and Lo Schermo dell’Arte.
