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. Even the wrong question points to the truth.
