In the dim blue hue of an office light, we see a pair of eyes gloss over a floor strewn with dead, bloodied bodies. The eyes shudder and look out somewhere, into the middle distance; not at the walls of the conference room that enclose them, not directly at the glow of a computer screen. Below, a pair of hands continues to maniacally hit a keyboard. These furtive movements belong to Claire, played by the inimitable Kayije Kagame, the protagonist of filmmaker and artist Valentin Noujaïm’s chilling 2024 short film, 'To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion' (2024), who we watch, sit alone, but not alone, become like stone, or statuary, in her dark, corporate chamber. What does she see?
For nearly a decade, Valentin Noujaïm, who grew up in France as the child of Lebanese and Egyptian emigres, has been making films about the erasure of peoples and histories by the construct of empire and the bleak façades of “progress” erected in their stead. Le Défense, the looming business district to the west of Paris, built on razed shantytowns, gives the name to a trilogy of short films by Noujaïm (2022-25), each of which fuses documentary technique with mythic narrative to mine and undermine the monument’s rotting foundations.