The characters ended up taking the actors’ first names: Vinz (Vincent Cassel), the Jewish hothead who, after a riot, finds a cop’s Smith & Wesson and vows to take revenge for the latest police beating Hubert (Koundé), the ruminative black boxer and small-time dealer who tries to get his friend to drop the bluster Saïd (Taghmaoui), the Arab joker who mediates between them. Kassovitz started writing his script the same day as that shooting: 24 hours in the life of a “ black-blanc-beur” (black-white-Arab) tricolour of wideboys living on a Paris sink estate. This was just one of more than 300 recorded bavures (“slip-ups”) committed by French police since 1981. I was so mad at the whole situation,” says Kassovitz today. “I was in my car, not too far away, when I heard about it on the radio, so I parked and went to join in with the protests. Its then 27-year-old writer-director Mathieu Kassovitz had been driven to make it by outrage over a similar incident to Belhabib: the accidental shooting of 17-year-old Zairian immigrant Makomé M’Bowole in a police station in April 1993. La Haine, which premiered 25 years ago this week, asked the right questions.
Not police brutality, nor the social conditions in “Noisy-la-Haine”, as one newspaper put it – the poverty and boredom that may have led Belkacem Belhabib to steal the motorbike that he fatally crashed into a set of traffic lights. When, in June 1995, Paris’s eastern suburb of Noisy-le-Grand began rioting after the death of a 21-year-old French-Arab in a police chase, politicians and the media asked if a film released the previous week, La Haine, had sparked the mayhem. E ven the wrong question points to the truth.