CURA.

Paris’s La Défense is a jungle of impersonal glass and steel towers and bland chain stores. Perched on the eastern-edge of the city, its central architectural feature is a 110-meter high arch fashioned from concrete that looks like a giant picture frame without a picture. The surrounding modern business district, developed in the 1960s to signal that France could be on par with the major financial centers of the world, screams “empire.” It is not unimportant that it was built on land that had been previously home to shantytowns.

Eight years ago, the artist Valentin Noujaïm, who grew up in France as the child of Egyptian and Lebanese emigres, encountered a French-Algerian man who revealed a fascinating secret about La Défense: in the early 1980s, a subterranean nightclub tucked in a parking lot in the district changed nightlife forever for people like him. In the first film of what would soon become a trilogy orbiting La Défense, Noujaïm captures the man whose name is Azedine Benabdelmounene reminiscing about said club, which was named “Le Pacific” and catered to a mostly youthful Arab clientele from the banlieues, or suburbs.

Benabdelmounene reminisces about the rituals associated with going out (getting his hair blown out in Belleville), the clothes that he and his friends wore (turtlenecks, Adidas, a hand of Fatima), and the music they loved (rai and soul). Over time, his monologue makes vivid the spatial dynamics of an Arab population that resided on the margins of the city, that lived for a night out, and that was beaten down care of the proliferation of drugs like heroin. “The French state let it happen,” he reflects, about what can be termed a sort of institutionalized neglect.

It could be said that Pacific Club is emblematic of Noujaïm’s films, which often dip into the mythological and feature France’s vexed postcolonial histories as a backdrop. Characters in his films are haunted by these histories. They carry psychic wounds. They are the children of colonialism, saddled with foreign names and brown skin but navigating France’s top-down assimilationist ethos, the fantasy that the state can absorb anyone as long as they pledge allegiance to French values. In this way, Noujaïm, like both Alice and Mati Diop, is part of a generation of artists who sensitively excavate this fraught terrain, who expose the state’s internal contradictions and contortions, its ironies.

The fact that La Défense, as a totemic site, is the central character of Noujaïm’s trilogy of the same name is not insignificant. Architecture informs and inflects much of his work. You see it in Before forgetting Heliopolis, a tender portrait of the Cairo suburb from which his family hailed, or Oceania, in which a young man living with his mother in a typical French housing estate expresses curiosity about an anti-colonial movement in Algeria that preceded him. In Daughters of Destiny, the HLM in which the three young female protagonists reside is both home and penitentiary, the bright lights of Paris forever in the distance—just out of reach. Architecture is never neutral. In service to power, it orders lives, tames, signals. It is where utopia is rendered dystopian. The films’ distinctive dark hue only accentuates this feeling.

To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion is Noujaïm’s second film in the trilogy, in which a young black businesswoman, played by the striking Kayije Kagame, goes about her corporate job, which involves hawking a soulless new real estate venture. “If I could live in it, I would,” she says, unconvincingly, to two white and suited and expressionless men. It is no accident that the film’s title is drawn from a book by AbdouMaliq Simone, the esteemed sociologist and theorist of power and powerlessness in urban spaces. The name Noujaïm has given this new Babel, “Atlantic Tower,” evokes the Middle Passage as well as the thousands who drown in the sea each year straining to reach Fortress Europe. To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion evokes a world in which individuality is pulverized in service to anonymized corporate interests. It also reveals the cost of living in such a world; late in the film, as her body begins to glitch, the businesswoman fantasizes about setting the tower on fire.

As it happens, doomy apocalypse also stalks Demons to Diamonds, the third film in the series, which debuted at Noujaïm’s recent solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel. The film opens with a thud, literally; a body falls from the sky as Kagame, making a cameo, adjusts her hair using her camera phone. Crowds run in every which direction, panicked. A newscaster announces that a 45-year-old woman has jumped from one of La Défense’s towers, while it turns out that this is only one of a string of tragedies to hit the district; every evening, at exactly 6:59 PM, someone jumps.

A hint of Noujaïm’s trademark paranormal sleight of hand stalks the film as he cuts to a subterranean figure enmeshed in chains. This figure delivers a stirring monologue that serves as the film’s urtext and conscience. Said monologue evokes soaring skyscrapers that match big egos, workers who feed the machine, like automatons, a city with rotting foundations; “a city with no future.” No future, at least, for France’s others.

It is an altogether bleak vision of the present.