It’s a pretty dramatic image, but one that indexes the trouble of surveying the landscape La Haine has existed in for the past 30 years. Charting 24 hours in the lives of three friends—Saïd, who is Maghrebi; Vinz, who is Jewish; and Hubert, who is Black—who live in the Chanteloup-les-Vignes banlieues of the Parisian suburbs, La Haine opens with a decade-spanning montage of actual riot footage, set to Bob Marley and the Wailers’ mournful reggae track ‘Burnin’ and Lootin’. Ignited by 22-year-old Malik Oussekine’s murder at the hands of the police in 1986, these riots saw the banlieues transformed into sites of urban warfare—of racialized, trapped and socioeconomically oppressed populations being corralled and crushed by the force of the state. The asymmetry of this ‘war’ is made explicit in La Haine’s very first seconds: grainy footage of a man shouting at a wall of riot police, “You murderers! It’s easy to gun us down! We only got rocks!”
The cops in Cannes might have been pissed off, but the decades since have only seen increased police brutality, authoritarian crackdowns on protest and the relentless violence of (neo)colonialism against the global underclass—not just in France but everywhere you look. In Brazil, in Turkey, in the UK, emboldened by the Crime and Policing Bill, and on American college campuses, where last year riot police were unleashed on student solidarity encampments for Palestine. This violence is nothing new or exceptional but a trajectory built into the very foundations of the police, an institution created to protect property and wealth, not people, and whose modern-day form can be traced back to the slave patrols of the 1700s.
Over the years, responses to La Haine appear to be united by one sentiment, which echoes resoundingly in many of the film’s reviews on : it continues to be painfully “relevant”. Laura’s review, written a month after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minnesota, is the second-most liked on the platform. It reads, “we all know & live the story – the way it circles back & always stays relevant”. For Amaya, also writing in June 2020 and living in “the second poorest area of France”, La Haine has been relevant “since it came out, […] BEFORE it came out, and probably will continue to be relevant in the foreseeable future.” Watched by more than 868,000 members, it is the eighteenth highest-rated film of all time on , at the time of writing. Jaemart declares it a “perfect film”, while Jules bestows upon it the arguably greater accolade of “probably the first film that punched me in the face.”
