AFM Festival Ciné Club - La Haine

Join us at our new French Hub for the inaugural AFM Festival Ciné Club, your opportunity to watch and discuss seminal French films. Our Festival Ciné Club will launch with a 30th anniversary screening of the iconic and provocative La Haine, directed by the then-27 year old Mathieu Kassovitz and starring a young Vincent Cassel. We will be joined for discussion on the film by Andrew McGregor, Associate Professor in French Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, a passionate cinéphile and recent co-host of our very popular The Melbourne Salon - Screening France in Australia

A gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, La Haine is still very culturally-relevant, 30 years on.

Filmed in black and white, and borrowing from Scarface and Taxi Driver, La Haine became an immediate critical and box-office success.The film follows three friends, Hubert, Vinz and Saïd, as they roam the streets of Paris and the suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes in the 24 hours that follow a police beating that has left a young Arab man in hospital. The trio embody the phrase black-blanc-beur (black-white-Arab), which celebrates France's multiculturalism, echoing the bleu-blanc-rouge of the French flag.

We will discuss what makes La Haine a creative and technical masterpiece, as well as a cultural phenomenon, as timeless and powerful now as it was upon its release. The film stands as the definitive work of French banlieue cinema, a subgenre focussing on the socially and economically marginalised suburbs of France’s cities, which reveals so much about French cultural identity and humanity as a whole.

Mathieu Kassovitz won Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. The film scores a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.