La Haine
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, Said Taghmaoui
Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
One of the more highly praised French films of the 1990s, Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (Hate) tracks a day in the lives of three residents of a low-income banlieue immigrant district on the outskirts of Paris. It's the morning after a race riot (of the kind seen nationwide in 2005) and their friend, a young French Arab, is in hospital fighting for his life with a police gunshot wound.
The three protagonists - a black, an Arab and, surprisingly, a white Jew - wander the neighbourhood discussing the night before as they pick through its debris, and find a police gun. With revenge in mind, they head to central Paris where they are arrested, and where the film's ending plays out to a dramatic but ambiguous conclusion. These three friends represent the so-called racaille, or scum, as presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy's called them in 2005.
Although not an apologist film for the poorer immigrant class, it does focus on police brutality. The story was inspired by the real-life shooting of a handcuffed African in police custody in 1993. At the Cannes Film Festival, where Kassovitz won best director award, police guarding the auditorium turned their backs on the cast and crew.