The films focused primarily on male characters and tended to foreground violence and crime. Until recently, this cinema has often seemed as creatively and thematically limited as it was geographically contained. The above three films focus on “the life of marginalized suburban (mostly) male youth in French housing estates.” Since the mid-1990s this approach has dominated cinematic representations of the suburbs. Beyond geographic coincidence, these films shared similar approaches to the representation of suburban space and its inhabitants, or rather of a pre-selected group among them. The banlieue label crystalized in 1995 after critic Thierry Jousse applied the term to a group of films that included La Haine, Malik Chibane’s Hexagone (1994), and État des lieux (Jean-François Richet, 1995). Film scholar Will Higbee contends that banlieue cinema is the first category of film since the Western to be primarily defined by its geographical location. Banlieue cinema is confined, by definition, to a particular location already associated with the clichés that predominate in media, political and social discourses.

While La Haine is in many ways a compelling and innovative film, it is also a problematic as a paradigm for a group of geographically related films. Nonetheless as many commentators and scholars have argued, the film offers at best an imperfect vantage point on the complex issues facing the banlieues. Former French President Jacques Chirac and his cabinet famously watched La Haine in an attempt to understand the situation in the suburban estates that surround Paris and other major cities. The film is a key early example of a category of filmmaking labelled by critics as “ banlieue” cinema. Kassovitz was just 28 when his second feature took French cinema by storm. This was demonstrated by the spate of articles marking its 20 th anniversary in publications as diverse as Indiewire and French dailies. The impact was both social and cinematic and the film continues to exert influence on both fronts. Mathieu Kossovitz’s La Haine made an immediate mark when released in 1995.

La haine themes