PARIS NOIR

Noir afficionado Delouche offers 13 stories that show how far from Paris those who live just outside the French capital really are.

Chloe Mehde lays out the premise in the very first entry, "I Am Not Paris." A young Muslim woman realizes how little French her family is seen as when her cousin is imprisoned for making a rude comment about <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>. One tale of marginalization follows another. In "Beneath the Peripherique," a runaway scraping by selling knock-offs at the Saint Ouen flea market is imperiled when she witnesses a crime. An Albanian escaping an honor killing rarely sees the light of day in Timothee Demeillers' "Pantin, Really." Even the community centers, built largely to serve immigrant communities, fail in their purpose, as Insa Sane shows in "Seeing Is Believing" and Karim Madani, in "The Morillon Houses." The drug trade flourishes in Rachid Santaki's "To My Last Breath." Even the wealthier enclaves, like Neuilly-sur-Seine, have their share of drug trafficking, as Marc Fernandes reveals in "The Baroness." Urban (or suburban) renewal schemes fail in Guillaume Balsamo's "Men at Work: Date of Completion, February 2027." And in some ways, as Anne Secret in "Shadows of the Trapeze" and Patrick Pcherot in "The Day Johnny Died" suggest, attempts to repurpose disused industrial sites are the root of the problem themselves.

Dark tales shine a bright light on some little-seen parts of greater Paris.