What set La Haine apart was not the story of riots but the depiction of youths from different cultural backgrounds, living in the same environment, together and in friendship. La Haine film was a film born out of tragedy (Photo: BFI) There is anger as they worry about their friend in a coma and want to see him, but there is also laughter as they talk about their own minor successes from the previous night. Vinz has managed to take a revolver from the police. Three friends – Vinz, an eastern European Jew, Saïd, an Arab from the north, and Hubert, a young black African whose boxing gym was burnt to the ground – are discussing what happened. It’s the morning after a night of battles with the law. He went home and began writing La Haine, set in the 24 hours after police put a young Arab in a coma. We needed to expose it so that people could understand it.” “They have a voice, there is a reason why they’re like that, and there is a reason why the interaction with the police is like that. “I knew those kids because I used to hang out with them,” Kassovitz said in an interview with Sight and Sound. The director wondered how a police officer could take out a gun out and shoot a child in handcuffs in the head. Upon hearing of the uprising, Kassovitz went to the area and saw M’Bowole’s family and friends mourning in the streets. A fan of hip-hop, Kassovitz had frequented the poor neighbourhoods surrounding Paris, immersing himself in their rap and graffiti culture. His debut feature film, Café au Lait, about two men trying to prove themselves the better father, was being prepared for release in August. Kassovitz, the son of a film director and a film editor, had a burgeoning reputation as a young actor and director at the time. During the police interrogation at the Grandes-Carrières police station in Paris, M’Bowole was killed by a single bullet in the head. On 6 April 1993, Kassovitz heard a story on the radio about Makomé M’Bowole, a 17-year-old boy from Zaire, who had been arrested along with two friends on suspicion of stealing a packet of cigarettes. La Haine was touted as a threat to the established order (Photo: BFI) Bombs detonated by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) were a reminder of France’s colonial past. 1995 was a year of discontent in France, with waves of strikes organised in response to the then prime minister Alan Juppé’s austerity measures. And it places the blame for these problems at the door of the elites in Paris. It is more accurate, however, to say that the film simply exposed the racism and divisions already present in French society. Even before it had premiered, La Haine was being touted as a threat to the established order. As Kassovitz and the film’s three young stars – Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé and Saïd Taghmaoui – were walking up the famous Cannes red carpet, the police on security duty turned their backs. Twenty-five years later, it is still remarkable to reflect on the impact that La Haine made at Cannes.
#Vinz la haine movie#
This month, the movie is re-released and will be the centrepiece of Redefining Rebellion, a season at the British Film Institute exploring on-screen rebels and agitators, from the silent era to today – they are all films that inspired or were inspired by the anti-establishment ethos of La Haine. But La Haine was undoubtedly the most notorious film of the festival – something more important than any prize bestowed by a Cannes jury. The film should arguably have taken home the Palme d’Or as well, which that year was won by Underground, Emir Kusturica’s tragicomic history of Yugoslavia.
#Vinz la haine series#
The sequence, the first of a series of indelible images in La Haine, would help Kassovitz win the Best Director award at Cannes in 1995 at the age of 29.
Positioned right behind the young man, almost on his shoulder, the camera appears to be backing him up, urging us to join this furious condemnation of the police. The opening scene of La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film about three friends from an impoverished Paris banlieue fighting back against police brutality, is particularly potent because of the camera angle. A young man in a tracksuit is standing in the street, gesticulating and shouting at a wall of police officers in riot gear.