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LA HAINE

The French Room
Cinema and Book Club Dec 2026 - Feb 2027

Mathieu Kassovitz's landmark 1995 film. Twenty-four hours in the lives of three young men in the Paris banlieues. Urgent, extraordinary, and still as relevant as the day it was made.

Live discussions with Ellie · Starts December 2026
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About this title

The film

Shot in black and white on a tight budget and released in 1995, La Haine won Best Director at Cannes and was screened for the French government cabinet shortly after its release.

Thirty years on, it remains one of the most important films in French cinema — and one of the most watched.

The film follows Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd — Jewish, African, and Arab — through twenty-four hours in a Parisian banlieue in the aftermath of a police riot. Kassovitz and his cast lived in the suburbs for three months before filming. The authenticity shows in every frame.

It is a film France is still having a conversation about. Which makes it endlessly rich material for discussion.

An enduring classic of french cinema

Why this choice?

  • The language is unlike anything taught in a classroom. La Haine is saturated in banlieue slang, verlan, and the raw, rhythmic speech of a France that rarely appears in textbooks. Hearing and understanding it is a genuinely significant step.

  • It opens a door to a different France. The Paris of La Haine is not the Paris of cafés and boulevards. Spending time with it gives a far more complete picture of the country — its tensions, its inequalities, its ongoing identity.

  • The film is a cultural landmark. To understand contemporary France — its politics, its suburbs, its debates about identity and policing — La Haine is essential. It is referenced constantly in French public life.

  • It rewards slow, repeated attention. The cinematography, the music, the structure of the dialogue — there is a great deal to notice across three months that a single viewing cannot reveal.

  • The discussions write themselves. La Haine raises questions about France, about Europe, about how societies treat their margins — questions that are as alive in 2026 as they were in 1995. The conversation will never run dry.
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"A work of tough beauty — a landmark of 1990s French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country's ongoing identity crisis."
The Criterion Collection

What to expect

How the cycle works

Each month Ellie hosts a live discussion inside The French Room. We explore the language, the humour, the cultural references, and what the film reveals about France and the French.

You watch at your own pace — there is no test, no homework, no pressure to have understood every word.

The cycle runs for three months. That is time enough to watch the film more than once, to notice things you missed, and to let the language become genuinely familiar.

Some French stories deserve more than one evening's attention.

Live discussions with Ellie every month.
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