Event

La Haine

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 Pariss 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 Arabgive human faces to Frances 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 countrys ongoing identity crisis.

"A layered conundrum that builds to a stunning crescendo, Mathieu Kassovitz's Hate is an extremely intelligent take on an idiotic reality: the mutual mistrust, contempt and hatred between the police and France's disenfranchised young citizens." - Variety

"One of the most blisteringly effective pieces of urban cinema ever made." - Times UK

"Writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz mines so much tension and pointed dialogue from a low budget and deceptively simple premise that you wonder why so much of current Hollywood's own social realism ends up shooting $50 million blanks." USA TODAY