"There will always be police brutality," said Kassovitz. Traore has become something of a French George Floyd, with thousands of people taking to the streets recently to protest the findings of an inquiry that seemed to clear the police. He regularly engages in bareknuckle Twitter combat with the French police and has been a vocal supporter of Assa Traore, who has led a four-year campaign for justice for her brother Adama, a young black man who died after being pinned to the ground by the combined weight of three officers during a routine identity check. Not that the actor has given up the fight. The banlieues are just as restive and excluded as they were for the film's three highly symbolic protagonists: one Jewish, one North African and the other black, he insisted.Īll you can do, Kassovitz said, "is to add your little contribution so that generation after generation, maybe in 100 or 200 years - or even in 100,000 - we will resolve the problem." "But films don't change the world," Kassovitz added bitterly. "It's extraordinary to be able to make something that lasts, even if the problems it confronted are still as sharp," he said. Yet the wrongs it took on with what Kassovitz calls a "fierce and hard realism" seem as unresolved as ever. Indeed the movie is so "part of people's lives" and French cultural identity in general, that a musical version of the story will hit the stage next year. It blazed a path for films like "Les Miserables", which covered similar ground and was nominated for a best foreign language Oscar this year, as well as a whole French sub-genre of "banlieue" movies. "We are all children of 'La Haine'," he told AFP. Kassovitz is re-releasing the gritty black-and-white film about three young men from the high-rises - which launched the career of Vincent Cassel - next month in France as the country grapples with another spate of police brutality cases. "But the important thing is not the fall, it's the landing." "So far so good," said the actor and director with acid irony, repeating the film's most famous line that a man repeats to himself as he falls from a 50-storey building. The headlines are again dominated, both in France and elsewhere, by police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. His powerful 1995 film "La Haine" (Hate) lifted the lid on the police racism in the poor and seething suburbs of Paris.Ī quarter of a century on - and despite the 2005 riots sparked by heavy-handed policing - lessons remain unlearned. You can forgive Mathieu Kassovitz feeling a sense of deja vu.
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