La Haine 15

★★★★★ – Empire

Each month a staff member picks a film to screen at Phoenix, this August Projectionist Sean Carroll has chosen Mathieu Kassovitz’s iconic La Haine, which follows the lives of three young men in the banlieues of Paris.

"I first saw La Haine when I was 15 and I didnt know about the controversy. I didn’t know that Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front, had called for the filmmakers to be jailed. Or, that when it screened at Cannes, police officers turned their backs on the filmmakers in protest. La Haine isn’t just a film about violence or politics, it’s a tightly made portrait of pressure, identity and disillusionment. Shot in stark black and white, it shows a side of Paris rarely seen on screen, with performances and direction that feel more urgent than ever thirty years on."