Justice & Law Quote by Mathieu Kassovitz

Kassovitz is doing two things at once: lowering expectations about polish while raising the stakes about meaning. Calling HATE an “underground movie” isn’t a humblebrag so much as a defense strategy. It signals DIY urgency and a refusal of the French prestige pipeline that would rather package “banlieue problems” as tasteful social realism. The aside “even if it’s making money” is a sly jab at how quickly a work of dissent can be neutralized once it becomes a hit. Success doesn’t invalidate the film’s anger, but it does threaten to turn it into a commodity audiences can purchase instead of confront.

The quote also resists the most common misreading of La Haine: that it’s “about the hood,” meaning a contained, exoticized zone where violence happens because of culture or bad choices. Kassovitz insists the real target is “police brutality in the largest sense,” which is his way of widening the frame from individual incidents to a system: institutions that patrol certain bodies, media that narrate them as threats, politicians who treat fracture as inevitability. “The whole of society” is an accusation, not a plea for empathy. It says the banlieue isn’t a distant pathology; it’s the mirror where France’s republican self-image cracks.

In context, that matters: mid-90s France was publicly processing uprisings, deaths in police custody, and the gap between color-blind national rhetoric and lived segregation. Kassovitz’s subtext is clear-eyed: if you watch this film as “their story,” you’ve already sided with the machinery it’s exposing.