La Haine

Wednesday 15 July at 7.30pm –  Open to the Public

Mathieu Kassovitz | France/Italy | 1995 | 98 mins | R18 violence & offensive language

In co-operation with the Institut Français and the Embassy of France.

Tensions between residents and police simmer to boiling point in the banlieues outside Paris. Kassovitz’s cinematic sensation contrasts its gritty atmosphere with poetic surrealism.

“Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La Haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La Haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.” – Janus Films

“[Kassovitz] combats the inertia and boredom of his frustrated antagonists with a thrusting, jiving camera style which harries and punctuates their rambling, often very funny dialogue. The politics of the piece are confrontational, to say the least, but there is a maturity and depth to the characterisation which goes beyond mere agitprop: society may be on the point of self-combustion, but this film betrays no appetite for the explosion. A vital, scalding piece of work.” – Tom Charity, Time Out