Politics & Power Quote by Mathieu Kassovitz

Kassovitz is voicing the particular kind of anger that comes after you’ve done everything “right” in a democracy and discovered the system’s favorite response is polite non-response. The line isn’t a plea for praise; it’s a refusal to accept visibility as victory. “It’s good that they’ve seen it” sounds almost grateful, then immediately curdles into an indictment: if power can watch an urgent film and remain unchanged, then attention is just another way of absorbing dissent.

The key move is the contrast between labor and inertia. Two years of work becomes a moral ledger; the government’s doing “nothing” is framed not as oversight but as a choice. Kassovitz positions cinema as more than culture and less than policy - a pressure test. If art can reach the state and still fail to trigger action, the failure isn’t the film’s reach; it’s the political machine’s capacity for compartmentalization.

The context matters: Kassovitz is inseparable from La Haine, a movie built from the lived volatility of banlieue life and police violence in 1990s France. That film didn’t merely depict unrest; it warned of its inevitability. So this quote reads like a director watching his own prophecy be filed away. Subtextually, he’s calling out a familiar liberal alibi: we’ll consume your critique, even applaud its craft, as long as it doesn’t demand structural change. The question lands as an accusation because it’s posed as a genuine dilemma - what is “making a difference” worth if the only measurable outcome is that the powerful felt briefly informed?