La Haine

Part of the Series: Criterion Essential Collection

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 Kounde), and Said (Said 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.

Kassovits won Best Director and the film was nominated for the Palm d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.