Of the three main characters, it is Hubert that speaks the most sense, famously speaking the line from which the film’s title is derived – “ La haine attire la haine”, or “Hatred breeds hatred”. It also succeeds in highlighting the consequences of this hostility – more death, more violence, more discrimination. La Haine succeeds in its mission of articulating the anger felt by minority communities at their mistreatment. Again, like Gahan, Irvoas and Le Chenadec in 2005, Oussekine had not been violent or actively rioted. Then there was Abdel, the film character attacked in the riots, whose story was lifted from the death of Malik Oussekine, a student protester chased and beaten to death by riot police in 1986. Kassovitz has also elaborated on the specific events that led to the creation of La Haine, the first of which was the story of Zairian Makome M’Bowole, a victim that was handcuffed to a radiator and shot at point blank range in police custody in 1993. Cars were torched and power plants were symbolically destroyed in a series of riots which claimed victims in the form of Salam Gahan, Jean-Claude Irvoas and Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec – none of whom were involved in the demonstrations themselves. These scenes later repeated themselves a decade after the film’s release in 2005 when nationwide riots broke out following news that two teenagers had died from electrocution in a Clichy-sous-bois power station while hiding from policemen. The film’s opening riot scene is authentic documentary footage.
These stories are not exaggerated for cinematic flair.
Vinz discovers a policeman’s revolver dropped in the midst of the action and vows to use it to kill a cop his personal revenge mission tells the story of ongoing mutual hatred between local youth and local law enforcement which manifests itself throughout displays of racial profiling, unapologetic discrimination and excessive force of the openly racist officers. The film details 19 hours in the lives of Vinz, Sayid and Hubert, all of whom are badly shaken by a riot which leaves their friend, Abdel, in a coma after being brutalised by police. These banlieues provide the backdrop for Kassovitz’s story of three young male immigrants living in a multi-ethnic council estate. The English word is intrinsically linked with idealistic portraits of quaint family life in countryside towns the French word, on the other hand, refers to areas rife with youth unemployment, urban poverty and high crime rates. These banlieues can be literally translated as ‘suburbs’, a translation which is somewhat misleading. It was 21 years ago that Mathieu Kassovitz unleashed the critically-acclaimed La Haine, an unflinching tale of racial tension and police brutality in the banlieues of Paris.
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