Mémoires à vif – Brussels Attacks, 10 Years On

On 22 March 2016, two suicide bombers detonated devices at Brussels Airport in Zaventem, and a third struck the Maelbeek metro station. Thirty-two people were killed. Hundreds more were injured. A country was changed.

Ten years on, this documentary by Arthur Gillet and Malika Attar returns to those whose lives were upended that morning. Jaana, Sandrine, Katrijn, Edmond, Marjan, Christelle, Michel, and Louis speak directly to camera, recounting the shock, the hospitalisations, the desperate searches for loved ones, the grinding administrative processes, and the long work of rebuilding. Their accounts are unhurried and unsparing.

The film also follows the judicial proceedings at the Justitia courtroom, where victims, jurors, and judges attempt to bring language and law to something that resists both. There are no reconstructions, no archival spectacle. Only testimony.

What Mémoires à vif examines, quietly and with great seriousness, is what mass violence leaves behind once the news cycle moves on. What it inscribes on the body. How it reorders a family. What it forces a society to confront about how it treats its survivors.

The wounds, a decade later, remain close to the surface. The film insists they be seen.