Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

Voices of Protest

La haine

1h 38m

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz • 1995 • France
Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Koundé, Saïd Taghmaoui

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), a Jew, an African, and an 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.

Up Next in Voices of Protest

  • Hunger
    1:36:12
    Hunger

    Hunger

    Directed by Steve McQueen • 2008 • Ireland, United Kingdom
    Starring Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Liam Cunningham

    With HUNGER, British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen has turned one of history’s most controversial acts of political defiance into a jarring, unforgettable cinematic experie...

  • This Is Not a Film
    1:17:55
    This Is Not a Film

    This Is Not a Film

    Directed by Jafar Panahi • 2011 • Iran
    Starring Jafar Panahi

    The first work fearless auteur Jafar Panahi made after being officially banned from filmmaking by the Iranian government, this clandestine documentary—shot partially on an iPhone and smuggled into France in a cake for a last-minute sub...

×