![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii9zhXxL3KL7gIbdK409SEWFLK7ONQG8YUItxPTSDh_MQ-odQBAUYOkEAxTOoKoUjrplO7soiUU_Y1dXnG_mLMRnX4j10M_QlAmWv6vtDEJdHIS5-OR_y5H_igfHfUchvHTYTPRyT1wCk/s400/14th+rooftop.jpg)
East Village rooftops (and at least one hammock) via James and Karla Murray.
Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) — a Jew, an African, and an Arab — give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.