It was the swaggering black-and-white drama that exposed the cracks in an unequal France.
Twenty-five years later, its director Mathieu Kassovitz wonders what has changedEven the wrong question points to the truth.
When, in June 1995, Paris’s eastern suburb of Noisy-le-Grand began rioting after the death of a 21-year-old French-Arab in a police chase, politicians and the media asked if a film released the previous week, La Haine, had sparked the mayhem.
Not police brutality, nor the social conditions in “Noisy-la-Haine”, as one newspaper put it – the poverty and boredom that may have led Belkacem Belhabib to steal the motorbike that he fatally crashed into a set of traffic lights.La Haine, which premiered 25 years ago this week, asked the right questions.
Its then 27-year-old writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz had been driven to make it by outrage over a similar incident to Belhabib: the accidental shooting of 17-year-old Zairian immigrant
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