Politics & Power Quote by Mathieu Kassovitz

Kassovitz skewers the state’s preferred way of knowing: at a safe remove, pre-filtered, and socially disinfected. The jab lands in the casual phrasing, almost tossed off, but it’s surgical. A “special screening” isn’t just a logistical courtesy; it’s a metaphor for governance by VIP access, where power preserves itself from the very conditions it claims to manage. They “didn’t have to see the experience” is the killer clause. He’s not talking about plot comprehension. He’s talking about the ritual of exposure: buying a ticket, sitting among strangers, being forced into proximity with the public mood. Officials want the message without the mingling.

The context is Kassovitz as a director associated with La Haine and its portrait of banlieue life: alienation, policing, boredom that curdles into volatility. His point isn’t that politicians are ignorant in the abstract; it’s that ignorance is engineered. The screening becomes an institutional workaround, a way to consume representation of marginalized spaces while avoiding the spaces themselves. “The projects” functions as both place and accusation: the state will study the periphery like a problem set, but won’t cross the invisible border to witness the human reality it produces.

Subtextually, Kassovitz is indicting a feedback loop: officials retreat from lived experience, rely on mediated summaries, then craft policy that further entrenches distance. It’s not just hypocrisy; it’s a structural refusal of contact, packaged as professionalism.