Review of La Haine (1995) by Brandon S — 10 Jul 2017

In my young life, few pieces of art have left me as shaken as Mathieu Kassovitz's "La haine" did.

Violence begets violence, and all of the victims in this cycle can and should be avoided. However, once the wheel begins turning, it becomes difficult to stop. Much like other great socially conscious works, like Inarritu's "Amores Perros" and Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing", don't look here for answers to all of the addressed problems. But I don't feel that it's the responsibility of art to solve problems, or even always present solutions. It's about starting a dialogue. That's what a film like "La haine" does so well; it puts names, faces, personalities, goals, dreams, talents, struggles to the statistics left behind by unnecessary violence, and, in that, forces the viewer to come to terms with the world as we, unfortunately, still know it today.