26SEPT2025: Bidoun and 99 Canal present a special screening of Pacific Club, filmmaker Valentin Noujaim’s 2022 film about a little-known Paris nightclub that catered to a mostly young, mostly Arab clientele during the 1980s.
Set against the backdrop of racism, a heroin epidemic, and the emerging AIDS crisis, Pacific Club is the first in a trilogy of films orbiting around the Parisian business district known as La Défense and its unlikely postcolonial histories.
Coinciding with this special screening, the evening celebrated Valentin’s new monograph published by Mousse “Interzone”, published alongside the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, earlier this year at Kunsthalle Basel.
Selected quote by 99 Canal’s team
“So yes, I use noir and thriller tropes deliberately — to evoke uncanniness, the haunting sense you feel in La Défense. No matter how many towers or statues you build, the darkness of its history remains. That’s why I chose to use these genres, and to counter the conventions of French cinema with something different.”
Valentin Noujaïm
“The film isn’t trying to unearth an archive, or to fill in its gaps. Nor is it trying to construct a new one. It’s doing something else — with desire, but also with history. So how do you think the book functions in relation to the archive? Would you say it is an archival document, or something else?”
Perwana Nazif
Speakers:
Valentin Noujaïm (born 1991) is a Franco-Lebanese artist and filmmaker based between Paris and Athens. A graduate of La Fémis (FR) and the Städelschule (DE), his work explores collapse, memory, and symbolic violence through hybrid forms combining 16mm film, digital, and performance. His films have been presented at MoMA (US), the Centre Pompidou (FR), Kunsthalle Basel (CH), the International Film Festival Rotterdam IFFR (NL), Visions du Réel (CH), CPH:DOX (DK), and the Salon de Montrouge (FR). He has been an artist-in-residence at the Villa Medici (IT), Artagon (FR), Lafayette Anticipations (FR), and Fondation Fiminco (FR). Demons to Diamonds (2025) concludes his trilogy on the La Défense district, following Pacific Club (2023) and To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024).
Adam HajYahia is a scholar, writer, and curator living and working in Palestine and New York. He is invested in how practices of image-making, performance, writing, and sound—both within and outside the art market—reflect on, simulate, and initiate sociability and political consciousness. His work looks at the at-once affinitive and conflictual dialectic between psychic desire and capital, and how, through examining this relation, one can understand social organization, anticolonial histories, aesthetic production, labor politics, speculation, and subject formation.
Perwana Nazif is an independent writer and curator in addition to her work as the art director for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in The Quietus, Artforum, SFAQ, and the Vinyl Factory, among others.
Transcriptrecorded on 24.07.2025
Valentin Noujaïm (VN): My name is Valentin Noujaim. This is the first part of my trilogy on La Défense. I’ll just give a quick introduction and explanation about the film, but also about this conversation.
This first film was made in 2021, the second in 2023, and the third was just finished for a show at Constance in Switzerland, where it premiered. On Monday, I showed all three films together for the first time at MoMA, which was also the first time I presented them as a continuity.
They are three short films, about an hour in total. They share a lot in common, but they’re also very different. What ties them together is, of course, La Défense — the main territory I play with. Aesthetically, it’s always the same camera, the same colors, the same visual style. In terms of content, there are similarities but also differences in genre. The first is more portrait and documentary, the second more experimental, and the third definitely more fiction.
While I was finishing the trilogy, I was also preparing a solo show at Coste le Basil with curator and director Mohammed. I wanted us to publish a monograph, which I called Interzone. We can talk later about the name. Tonight is actually the first night I’m showing the book. It was printed only two weeks ago, so it’s very new. We don’t have many copies here — because of your president’s tariffs we couldn’t send many — but there will be a North American distributor later. Tonight we just have a few copies for sale. The book is a continuation of the films. It has stills but also new images. It’s not just documentation of the films or the show — it evolves the work, continuing what I was trying to do with the trilogy. It’s almost like a fourth chapter.
Tonight I want to talk about the three films and the book, but also many other things, with two people whose work and personalities I admire: Perwana, who wrote a very beautiful text in the book, and Adam, with whom I’ve never spoken publicly before. I’m very happy we’re having this conversation together.
It’s going to be more of an open conversation. If you have things to add, please feel free to join in. It’s meant to feel like a conversation among friends. It’s also the first time I do this format — with films, a book, and two discussants — so I’m a bit impressed.
Adam HajYahia (AH): Okay, I have two things to put on the table — notes on the film, but also more broadly about the trilogy and your practice.
The first relates to something the feminist avant-garde introduced into cinema: psychoanalytic thinking. Queer approaches then added ways of thinking about desire in images. From the 70s and 80s until now, we’ve shifted from a formal investment in desire and the unconscious — in libidinal investment in the image — to more of a focus on depicting figures with identitarian markers that are easily legible. So there’s been a move from formal questions to content-driven ones.
What I find compelling in your work is how it excavates these earlier modes. The first film, about the Pacific Club in La Défense, doesn’t necessarily engage with identitarian markers, but desire, libido, and sexuality are so present — even though the images are mostly of the city or the financial district. When we hear Azdin speak about his memories, his family, or his shyness, there’s still a libidinal tension in the image. That’s very compelling.
That brings me to my second point, which is more present across the trilogy: seduction. Since the trilogy is about the financial district, I can’t help but think of it in historical terms — Paris being redrawn after the Commune, with La Défense as an urban landscape tied to surveillance, power, colonialism, and capitalism.
Your images show how capital is seductive. There’s a tension between showing seduction and showing what seduction produces in subjects on camera. And so I wonder, in relation to that, how you think about film noir — what you draw from its history, and how you articulate it in your work today?
VN: To add to what you just said, and to answer your question: for those who don’t know, La Défense is in the northwest suburbs of Paris. It began as a financial district in the late 60s and really expanded in the 80s. The name itself is interesting — “La Défense” — because it was the site where the Communards defended Paris against the Germans.
The area was also home to one of the last slums of Paris, dismantled in the 90s. They even built one of the architectural schools on the site of this last encampment, which had largely housed Algerians arriving after the war. So La Défense was literally constructed like a colony — built on a territory the state considered “lost.”
When I began the trilogy, it was important for me to think of this land as re-conquered in the French imagination, “won back” with concrete towers that erased the traces of Algerian community.
For those who know French history, the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris is also relevant — many were drowned in the Seine by police after a peaceful protest. That protest began in La Défense, from the camp there at the time. So the area was both a site of revolt and radicality, later erased by towers.
I don’t speak directly about this in the films, but it haunted me while filming. The suffering of Azdin and the other characters carries these ghosts. That’s where desire and noir come in. Even though the images are cold — blue, gray, sterile — I wanted to reintroduce bodily presence, through dancing, through the saxophone, through performance moments filmed almost like live acts.
So yes, I use noir and thriller tropes deliberately — to evoke uncanniness, the haunting sense you feel in La Défense. No matter how many towers or statues you build, the darkness of its history remains. That’s why I chose to use these genres, and to counter the conventions of French cinema with something different.
Perwana Nazif (PN): Yeah. The text I wrote for the book really tries to explore the libidinal forces, the historical forces, and also the attempt at annihilating desire. That tension is there in the first film, and also in the others.
Bouncing off what Adam said — about not submitting to identitarian categories — I was struck by how the films work with and against legibility. They don’t necessarily strive for coherence, or label gestures as “resistance” or as legible within political discourse, but they still hold space for multiple readings.
I wanted to ask about the continuities between the films. Each explores these forces differently, but also together. Seeing the trilogy all at once is very different from seeing one alone. Could you walk us through how this develops across the three films?
VN: It’s a very new experience for me too. The trilogy will tour in different cities in the coming months, so maybe my perspective will change. But what I noticed watching them together is how they counter one another.
For example, the first film is melancholic, even sad at the end. For me the saxophonist has a funeral aspect. But the second film shifts that feeling, turning it into something more poisonous.
Today we were talking about a word I kept in mind while working: contamination. This neighbourhood contaminates people, and people contaminate each other. When you see the three films together, you can make mental connections — for example, from Azdin’s suffering in the first film to the latex-clad CEO in the third.
The films work alone, but together they contaminate each other. That was important to me. And behind contamination, I also wanted to evoke paranoia — the sense that maybe there is something bigger, darker, intentionally contaminating. In the third film and in the book, we really developed this idea. The first part of the book shows film stills, but gradually it shifts — it starts to feel like someone’s notebook, like traces of a plan for La Défense, something even sinister.
So when you see the trilogy, you sense that evil emerging. It’s not just destiny, it’s something more complex.
PN: I saw the book for the first time today, with all the images and materials, and re-watched the film. It made me think about the category of the archive.
The film isn’t trying to unearth an archive, or to fill in its gaps. Nor is it trying to construct a new one. It’s doing something else — with desire, but also with history. So how do you think the book functions in relation to the archive? Would you say it is an archival document, or something else?
VN: I don’t know if I have a real answer. It’s a question I asked myself with Pacific Club and still ask today: what does it mean to make a film about a place that maybe doesn’t want to be archived, that doesn’t want to exist in that way?
As filmmakers, we always risk becoming archaeologists — unearthing something and putting it on display. But with Pacific Club it was clear: many people didn’t want this story archived. It was their moment, not meant for the public. That’s why the film keeps a certain distance.
With the book and trilogy, I don’t know if I created an archive of my own desire, or of my voyeurism. I think the trilogy, especially the second and third films, have a strong voyeuristic element. And the book reflects that — maybe that’s the archive I was making: an archive of fascination, of trying to enter a world just by seeing it.
AH: At the screening earlier this week, someone described your work as “memory work.” I don’t know how you feel about that. Personally, I don’t think you do memory work.
What you do, to me, is evoke something more dreamy, more elusive, rather than grounding it in fixed historical facts. You create moments of contemplation, letting the image decide how we relate to it.
In France, national narratives control so much of how history is experienced. You mentioned AIDS — in France, people talk about AIDS in the U.S., but never in France. You don’t know who was affected, because racial background can’t be disclosed. Ideological frameworks govern everything.
Your films don’t try to correct history, or counter it with another ideology. Instead, you lay bare the framework, but let the image breathe. That creates a tension: seeing La Défense, a place of violence, represented as seductive, even sexually enticing — especially in the second and third films.
That tension, I think, is what your work stages — rather than a counter-history or an archive.
PN: I just wanted to add — I don’t think this is restitution work at all. And I think it goes beyond excavation of structures. It’s more about an intense confrontation with loss and with death. We’ve talked about melancholy, about dreams. I think dream-work really comes in here, yes.
VN: The question of memory — that’s what I was trying to do in my solo show, actually. I called it Pantheon. In France, in Paris, there’s this huge monument called the Panthéon, created after the French Revolution.
When you enter, there’s this massive painting that tells the official history of France — starting from, not the Vikings, but the Gauls, and then through everything that follows. It’s like the official version of history. And in the basement are buried the “great” people who fought for France. It’s a whole process to be buried there — each president decides who goes in. So the Panthéon is really a temple of national history, of how the Republic tells its story to the people. France is obsessed with the idea of unity — one history, one language, one citizen — which is very different from the U.S.
So when I used the word “Pantheon” for my trilogy, it was also to mock or destroy that idea. I wasn’t trying to make a new Panthéon, a new official history. It was more about countering and dismantling the whole idea of history itself. The three films feel lost in space and time — you don’t really know where or when you are, and that was intentional. The filming style, the aesthetics, the costumes in the second and third films — they all create this confusion.
For me, this confusion was a way to counter the idea of creating an archive, or a fixed memory, which made me uncomfortable. By making space and time unstable, I could also play more — and that’s why the third film is the most playful. I wanted to bring into La Défense things that aren’t usually there — joy, desire, strange interactions — but always within a kind of uncanniness, a sense that something is wrong, or that everything might be fake. That was very important to me, as a way to counter the questions I was asking myself at that time.
And… yeah. If you have questions, please feel free to ask.
Audience: I was struck, earlier in the conversation, by this haunting effect of “tabula rasa” developments — the way they erase history. We have many examples here in New York. And of course with HIV/AIDS, there’s another form of erasure.
So I wanted to ask two things. First: how much of the undercurrent, the backstory of La Défense, is actually known — nationally or locally? How did you become aware of it, and drawn to it?
And second: post-making the film, especially this first one in the trilogy, which for me carried a memorial feeling — I’m curious about the ripple effects. There were those comments, the Dalida moment, people remembering and evoking the place. Has the film opened a space for memory, or a sense of community that had been dissolved? Have you heard about its life in the world since?
VN: It’s not very well known. La Défense isn’t a place people really go, except because it’s a major transport hub, and because the largest mall in France is there. Teenagers go there a lot now, especially in the past 10–15 years — it’s become a date spot, because all the trains meet there and there are so many shops.
But the history of La Défense itself? Not really known. The only official narrative that remains is the Grande Arche de La Défense — that’s the monument people recognize, connected symbolically to the Arc de Triomphe. The slums that were there, the existence of the Pacific Club — almost nobody knew about that.
For me, it was Azdin who introduced me to it. I had been to La Défense once before meeting him, and it just felt like a dead place. Then he told me about the club, and I was shocked. I hadn’t realized there had been slums so close to the neighborhood — I thought they were further out.
La Défense has no real “official” history, and it’s very hard to film there. They control their image tightly. In the 80s and 90s, there were artist studios in the basements, and a bit of an artistic life, but all that was erased. Only one studio remains, which you can visit. Now they’re trying to rebrand the area — when they sell apartments they call it the “Manhattan of Paris,” with “Manhattan lofts.” That’s the branding.
As for the Pacific Club community: there’s no archive, except online. There’s a YouTube channel called Les Anciens du Pacific, where people share music and memories. That’s where the comments you mentioned come from. There’s also a Facebook group. But beyond that, nothing.
There’s one sociologist who wrote about nightlife in 1980s Paris, and the club is only briefly mentioned. Most people don’t want to talk about it. Azdin was the one who asked me to make the film. Others I spoke with shared their stories, but didn’t want them included — for many reasons. Trauma — many lost a brother, sister, or lover there. The 80s were also extremely violent in France. The far-right Front National was rising. Fascists used to go to La Défense to attack them. So it’s not a happy memory.
And there’s also shame. Many were Arabs, very discreet, and today they don’t want their past in the club to be known. Many are married now, with families. So it was almost impossible to get others to speak on camera, and I respected that. I stayed with Azdin. Originally I thought of including many voices — especially women, since women were a big part of the club. But it didn’t work, for those reasons.
Audience 2: Thank you for the film and this conversation. A lot of the words used — erasure, memory, archiving — make me think about genocide today. I was wondering how you think about that. I myself work with photographers in Gaza, and I feel this tension: the desperate need to archive what’s happening, even as places and people are erased — and also the need to create art. Sometimes those two things pull against each other. Your film made me think of this — nothing remains in La Défense, yet there’s a visual poetry to the absence. How do you negotiate that tension?
VN: Thank you for your question.
The first film I made was before the genocide. The third film, made last year, is darker, more violent — you can feel it. But the question you raise — whether my films are archives — I don’t think I can answer. I don’t think I’m the one to decide.
I’m aware that when you film someone, or a place, it inevitably becomes testimony, even if you’re playing with form. It’s at least testimony to something. But as Perwana said earlier, maybe I’m not filling the gaps of an archive, but questioning the gaps themselves. Questioning the silence.
In France, when I showed Pacific Club, everyone was shocked. No one had ever heard of it. The silence around the 80s, around Arab communities, is enormous. And the silence continues today. So in that sense, yes, my films are testimonial, political — and I’m proud of that.
I don’t film violence directly — I’ve never filmed violence itself. But the system, the society, is violent. And that violence seeps through the images — maybe precisely because I choose to render it through poetic images.
I don’t know if I’ve really answered your question — but it connects to what you said.
VN: Thank you everyone — and thank you, Perwana and Adam, 99 Canal, and Bidoun.
About 99 Canal
99 Canal is an artist-run program based in the heart of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Fostering a community-centered environment, we facilitate artists’ access to professional studios and public exposure to experimental practices, with a strong emphasis on moving image and performance art.
