Kassovitz started writing the script of La haine on April 6, 1993, the day Makome M’Bowole, a young man from Zaire, was shot while in police custody in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris. This black-and-white chronicle of twenty-four hours in the life of a mixed-race young male trio from a run-down banlieue has resonated ever since. The explosive contents of the film, its unusually young creative team (Kassovitz and the three lead actors were all in their twenties), the fact that it won the prestigious best director prize at Cannes, its huge popular success, and the media circus that followed turned La haine into a phénomène de société that reached beyond its cinematic value. The convergence of Mathieu Kassovitz’s film and social unrest, however, was nothing new: at the time of its release in 1995, La haine was already, and controversially, linked to suburban violence and police bavures (slipups). Thus the book, which coincided with the tenth anniversary of the film, proved timely for unexpected reasons. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we hear over the credits, there was burning and looting and clashes with the police-which I could hear, as I was staying with my parents, who live next to one of these “difficult” suburbs. To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence.
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