La Haine Relaism

This film for me provides a realistic representation, the film keeps the realism by switching between real scenes and scenes from the film. For example, the first scene starts with real footage of riots in France, and then switches to Saïd, the riot police are still there, this instantly makes us feel like the film has a lot of realism, another element of realism is that this scene is shot on location in ‘The Projects. 

There are many real life examples in this film; the biggest is probably references to the Makole M’Boule who was shot in the neck by a police officer for theft. There is a very direct reference to this where a police officer threatens to shoot Hubert in the neck. This wouldn’t shock a international audience, but it would add to the realism for French Audiences because this was a news story in France. This scene involves a training police officer, this tells us that corruption and mistreating people is long running in French police, this officer is disappointed with these actions, and looks very uneasy, this forces us to feel uneasy by placing us in a situation.

One criticism for the film is that we are denied a POV from the police, so the actions of the police can seem exaggerated. If we saw a police POV maybe the film would seem less real, or the people from the projects are represented more as bad people. This films portrayal was so strong that in the premier of the film Mathieu Kasovitz was denied a police escort, this shows the effect of the film and that the police want to keep this representation quiet.