Valentin Noujaïm

Noujaïm’s “La Défense” trilogy of films uses the Paris business district of the same name as both setting and symbol.

Trained as a filmmaker, French Lebanese artist Valentin Noujaïm (b. 1991) makes immersive and cinematic short films that use tropes from film noir and dystopian narratives to investigate what it means to be an outsider in contemporary France. In Noujaïm’s “La Défense” trilogy, the Paris business district of the same name functions as both setting and symbol. Populated by glass-and-steel high rises, La Défense broke ground in the late 1950s and is now Europe’s largest non-residential, purpose-built business district. Noujaïm conceptualizes La Défense as a stage set, a non-place, and an artificial creation that people pass through anonymously but do not inhabit.

The first volume of the trilogy, “Pacific Club” (2022), uses elements of documentary filmmaking to unearth the history of Le Pacific, a 1980s nightclub located in a subterranean parking garage. The underground club was a space for Arab youth from the Paris suburbs; interview subject Azedine Benabdelmounen recounts how he spent his teenage years in “clubs where only Arabs hung out since we wouldn’t be allowed elsewhere.” The surreal fictional narrative of “Volume 2: To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion” (2024) centers on a troubled businesswoman who dreams of incinerating the office building that she is tasked with selling. In “Volume 3: Demons to Diamonds” (2025), the workers of La Défense inhabit a disturbing alternate reality in which one individual leaps to their death every day at 6:59 pm. Together, the films interrogate experiences of alienation, isolation, and paranoia while also foregrounding protagonists who resist the power structures in which they are enmeshed.

Valentin Noujaïm (French, born 1991)
La Défense Volume 2: To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (still), 2024
Film, 14:00 minutes
Courtesy of the artist