La Haine: The Criterion Collection
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La Haine, a
gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France,
specifically the low-income banlieue on Paris's outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete
environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Kounde), and SaÃ¯d (Said Taghmaoui) - a Jew, an African, and 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.