Crime, the city and the Congo: Family, race and the urban in recent Belgian cinema

Abstract

Pieter Van Hees’s Waste Land (2014) situates Belgian national anxiety in the country’s White supremacist past and present, both of which milieux are shared by its language communities. The film suggests, perhaps in spite of itself, that the claim by Brussels to be a centre of power is ethnically, as well as ethically, problematic. It breaks a taboo in confronting Belgium’s colonial past, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Leopold II’s accession (1865). Yet, it ultimately reproduces the economy of the racialized system it tries to critique, becoming particularly problematic from the point of view of Black women. The ineffability of spatial spectacle would betray the way in which its protagonist’s narrative is ‘mapped’ onto the space of Brussels, with the character’s breakdown – hence, a failed attempt at constructing his own narrative, at mapping his life in Brussels – bearing further unintentional testimony to the city’s abject history beneath it.