Steel Flowed Through Our Veins

In October 2013, ArcelorMittal announced the permanent closure of the Liège steelworks, ending two centuries of industrial life in Wallonia and leaving thousands of workers without a future. Thierry Michel's documentary takes that moment as its point of arrival, not its beginning.

Through personal testimonies and rare archival footage accumulated over fifty years, the film reconstructs the full arc of a working-class world shaped by blast furnaces, shift rotations, and the particular solidarity that forms among people who share hard, dangerous labour. The rhythms of that life come through clearly: the noise, the heat, the cold, the physical toll, and the bonds it created between generations of families.

The film does not treat the closure as an isolated corporate decision. It places it within the longer story of European deindustrialisation, asking what is lost when industries built over centuries are dismantled in the name of global profitability. The major strikes and collective struggles that marked Liège's steel history are part of that account.

What Michel has made is a work of industrial memory, attentive to individual lives and to the broader forces that shaped and then ended them. The personal and the structural are held together throughout.