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Retracing Vidange perdue
Film, Struggle, and Diasporic Dwelling in 1970s Brussels


Amel Moyersoen


And so this means that the film brought together multiple struggles, which were already intertwined anyway. And once you start showing the film — yes, yes — there, every time, you are making the link with other struggles.
—Malek Kellou
I met Malek Kellou for the first time in person in Brussels at the Pianofabriek. I could immediately tell he was a filmmaker, as he scanned the room trying to determine whether the noise levels were too high for the recording of our interview. They definitely were. I had chosen the Pianofabriek for our meeting as it always felt like a space where many of Brussels’s communities came together, where community work, militantism, and artistic expression crossed paths. Malek lives in Nancy now but, like me, comes back to Brussels often. We laughed about how strongly we still felt about this city even though our lives were now mainly elsewhere. Mine in London, his in Nancy. He asked me how I ended up in Brussels. I was born here, in the municipality of Saint-Josse, after my Algerian mother left her life in Algiers in the 1990s. “A good time to leave,” Malek agreed. She met my dad, a Belgian architecture student, and made a brave choice to start over in this city and build our family. As we talked about his last film Mange ton orange et tais-toi ! (Eat Your Orange and Shut Up!, 2024), we bonded over our need to understand our heritage, our familial histories and the lines they draw within broader histories, and our present realities. He said something that has stuck with me since: “Once you start digging, you only find more questions.” 

Four years earlier, while retracing the steps of Collectif Mohamed—a film collective of mainly second-generation North African teenagers who went about documenting the militantism, creativity, and joy of the Paris outskirts in the late 1970s and '80s—I found myself wondering about my own hometown, Brussels. What is the lineage, the heritage of its current militant and artistic diasporic scene? I believe in starting from the assumption of abundance instead of lack. Our gaps in knowledge are often but a reflection of our own ignorance, as well as the breaks and ruptures caused by the violent political amnesia necessary for the building of stable, consolidated nation-states and the upkeep of racial and class hierarchies. But despite these relentless structures, histories are remembered, documented, and passed on—through bodies, sounds, stories, print ephemera, or through film, inviting us to listen closely, and to inscribe ourselves within this persisting diasporic practice of documentation and transmission.

So it was that I stumbled upon the summer 1979 issue of the French quarterly Cinem’action, dedicated to migrant filmmaking in Europe. Two of its pages focused on migrant filmmaking in Belgium, highlighting Malek Kellou’s Vidange perdue (Non Returnables, 1974) and Mohamed Ben Salah’s Les uns, les autres (The Ones, the Others, 1972). I quickly turned to the YouTube channel Archives Numériques du Cinéma Algérien, an incredible resource on which archivist and filmmaker Nabil Djedouani gathers films, television shows, clips, and bits of Algerian moving-image heritage. And there it was: Vidange perdue, a documentary depicting the ruthless destruction of a popular neighborhood in the Northern Quarter of Brussels, intertwined with testimonies from migrant workers, as well as footage of protests against racialized police brutality and hunger strikes demanding legal status for workers. Just a few roads from where I grew up.

Vidange perdue was created as Malek’s end-of-year project at Brussels’s IAD (Institut des Arts de Diffusion). In the early 1970s, several, mostly newly independent nations decided to send students to film schools in Belgium, specifically in its capital Brussels. The hope was that the young, often men, would return after their training and help build a national cinema. This is how Malek Kellou (Algeria), but also Borhane Alaouié (Lebanon), Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud (Tunisia), Mohamed Ben Salah (Algeria), Michel Khleifi (Palestine), and Mweze Ngangura (Democratic Republic of the Congo) among others ended up in Brussels at the IAD or the INSAS (Institut National Supérieur des Arts du Spectacle et des Techniques de Diffusion). The films they made over the course of their studies varied in format from personal stories to experimental pieces, and covered themes such as class war, advertisement and capitalism, and education. Some of the students took interest in—and filmed—the realities of migrant workers, brought to Brussels to serve an altogether different purpose: labor. As such, their films are an important example of inter-struggle solidarity, and of documentation and transmission by migrants of migrants' experiences, allowing a diasporic gaze onto the plights and stories unfolding in Brussels at the time. This gaze and these modes of connection and transmission have become central to my research as a film programmer, and artist.

I approach these films not as unique artifacts, and these filmmakers not as pioneers, but rather as emergent of, and contributors to, a rich tapestry and long lineage of militant and artistic activity. While the films may seem like repositories of the past, they are in fact living entities that contain multiple temporalities—continuously unfolding outwards through time and space, never complete. Subsequent presentations and practices add layers to them—new interpretations that inflect them differently, transform them in some way, re-read them in light of the present and in relation to the future. By contrast, institutional archives often end up isolating these works in their obsession to preserve their condition and retain ownership over them, thus interrupting chains of transmission and preventing them from participating in a space of aliveness and connectivity, similar to the “diasporic dwelling space” described by film curator June Givanni. 

Inspired by the mapping practices of artists such as Bouchra Khalili and Olivier Marboeuf, and drawing on material from the platform First Waves dedicated to sharing militant histories of Maghrebi and Black diasporas in Belgium, I set out to map the web of events, struggles, and initiatives from which these student films emerged, marking a few nodes of interest that expand into texts meant to deepen and enrich the visual trail with theory, history, and story. I used the conversations I had with Malek, and his film Vidange perdue, as anchor points from which other parts of my research could further unfold. The map is an experiment in opening up a cinematic “diasporic dwelling space” inhabited through memory and lived experience. This experiment reclaims a tool strongly embedded in restricting movement and solidifying territories, to take its cue from the ability of diasporic film to reference and traverse multiple geographies and temporalities simultaneously. It allows me to express this story as one with many entry points and no end. The map is by no means comprehensive, or finished. I hope it can be an invitation to others—to you—to map out your own journeys and histories onto this landscape, allowing new readings that add layers and connections to it.


Amel Moyersoen


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