Together with his best friends Vinz (Vincent Cassel) – an angry Eastern European Jew – and kind-hearted North Africa Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), who serves as a kind of mediator between the other two, they stroll the gloomy torrid streets aimlessly, joking and talking. It is spoken by Hubert (Hubert Koundé), a philosophical, pacifistic, Afro-French boxer who dreams of a better life outside of the banlieues of Paris. “La haine attire la haine!” (Hatred breeds hatred!) is the line from which the title of the film derives. It was also the year in which Mathieu Kassovitz took the world by storm with his second documentary-like feature film La Haine with which he answered the year ‘95 even before it ended. Paris 1995 was a year that went into history as one of the darkest in France, because of its violent riots, shootings and bomb attacks linked (but never confirmed) to the Algerian war.
