La Haine and City Of God Focus

How significant are genre and narrative to you to understand your focus films?

In City of God the genre is very important to the audience, as we don’t really explore themes in depth as we do in La Haine. The first shot is a very stylistic shot of a chicken for city of god, and the first shot in La Haine is news like footage and real footage from riots. City of god has all the conventions of a crime film, it uses drugs, women and conflict, the conflict comes from a binary opposite, one of the most important one is Lil’Ze vs. Carrot, if there is no Carrot we don’t have a film, because the conflict comes through the drugs and dealing on each others turf, with this conflict comes a significant amount of deaths, this is a comment of the problems of people from the favelas that there is limited choice there and they are sometimes forced to go into crime as they may have no parents or male role models. La Haine comments more on social issues, Vinz Hubert and Said live on the projects, where most of immigrants live, so their opportunities are already limited……..