Nahel Merzouk, then seventeen, was shot and killed by a policeman in the Nanterre neighborhood of Paris just one week after Mathieu Kassovitz had announced on social media that he was writing a musical adaptation of his 1995 film La Haine. The incident served as a startling reminder of the murder that served as the original inspiration for La Haine and caused protests and rioting throughout France last summer.
Thirty years earlier, in 1993, a police officer shot and killed Makomé M’Bowolé, a seventeen-year-old Zaira immigrant. Following M’Bowolé’s passing, Kassovitz immediately began composing the movie. Following three friends, Hubert, Vinz, and Saïd, as they explore Paris’s streets and the Chanteloup-les-Vignes suburb for a full day after a young man is hospitalized due to a police beating, La Haine documents their adventures. The trio, reflecting the bleu-blanc-rouge of the French flag, embodies the phrase black-blanc-beur (black-white Arab), which praises France’s pluralism.
