ABSTRACT
When Mathieu Kassovitz’s second feature, La Haine, came out in 1995, a new auteur was born, and the world ‘discovered’ the Parisian suburbs. La Haine is a stylish black-and-white chronicle of a day in the life of three male youths from a rough housing estate outside Paris. Hubert (Hubert Koundé) is black, Vinz (Vincent Cassel) is white and Jewish and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) is a beur, slang for someone of second-generation North African descent. The film begins with television coverage of riots that took place on the estate the night before and during which a young beur, Abdel, was critically wounded. From then on, we follow the three friends on a supposedly ‘typical’ diet of boredom and violence which ends on a shocking new explosion of violence.
