In the Parisian business district of La Défense, where steel towers pierce a restless sky and CCTV watches every shadow, a wave of suicides expose the cracks of society. Amid the eerie glow of this collapsing city, lives collide, and destruction emerges as the only chance for rebirth.

Named after Europe’s largest business district, La Défense was built in the 1960s as a symbol of financial modernization in France, displacing Algerian communities, among others. Envisioned by the nation-state as a beacon of modernity, Noujaïm employs surrealist and horror-based filmic conventions to reimagine the district as a monument to exclusion and capitalist alienation.

La Défense – Volume III (Demons to Diamonds) is the third and final work in Noujaïm’s trilogy La Défense (2022-25). From the underground refuge of La Défense – Volume I (Pacific Club) (2022), the first work in the trilogy that centres on the district’s former nightclub for Arab workers, to the sterile corporate offices and the deadly heights of the towers anthropomorphized in La Défense – Volume II (To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion) (2024) and this work, Noujaïm charts a topography of power where marginalized subjects navigate between integration and rejection, ascent and falling, humanity and monstrosity.