When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Shot in cinema verité style, this film follows a day in the life of three aimless, violence-prone, ethnically-diverse young men who hail from the same decaying housing project in Paris.
Vinz, who is Jewish, is the angriest and the least intelligent of the three. North African Said is calmer, but is the most despairing about his future. Hubert is Black, and the most mature, channeling his rage through boxing. Although the trio seethes with fury over the arrest and senseless beating of an Arab friend, each manages to keep the other in check. But that changes after Vinz finds a loaded gun -- and the trio becomes entangled with the police, and later a group of skinheads.
SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES: A newly restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised by director Mathieu Kassovitz; new English-language audio commentary by Kassovitz; video introduction by Jodie Foster; optional Dolby Digital 5.1 track; Ten Years of "La haine," a new documentary that brings together key cast and crew a decade after the film’s landmark release; a new video featurette on the film’s banlieue setting, including interviews with sociologists Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jeffrey Fagan, and William Kornblum; behind-the-scenes footage shot during the film’s production; deleted and extended scenes, each featuring a new video afterword by Kassovitz; stills gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and theatrical trailers; and a new essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau and an appreciation by acclaimed filmmaker Costa-Gavras.
