Film Screening: La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995
Speaker(s): Cecile Tresfels
La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995, France
"Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good. How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!”: This black and white film immerses the viewer in the life of three young men and their time spent in the French “banlieue" over a span of approximately nineteen hours. Vinz, a Jew, Saïd, an Arab, and Hubert, a black boxer, are in their early twenties, from immigrant families and live in an impoverished multi-ethnic French housing project where tensions with the police have reached a critical point. The day after a violent riot, Vinz finds the gun of a cop, and promises to kill one himself if his friend Abel dies in the hospital, from the beating he received while in police custody. This rough and raw French classic brutally and poetically sheds light on the spatial, economical and social tensions that exist between two neighboring spaces: the center and the “banlieue”.