Immigrants In The Film Le Haine

The film Le Haine focused on the daily struggles of three main young men who are of Jewish (Vinz), North African (Hubert) and Arab (Saïd) descent that live in the suburbs of Paris. The three have been together and got involved with the riot, following the incident where one of their friends from the community has been arrested and brutally attacked by the police. Triggered by the ongoing unrest, the three friends’ lives took a drastic turn when they retrieved a gun at a crime scene, and decided to take the matters into own hands to get revenge. Le Haine not only portrayed the parallel and segregated way of living between the mainstream population (the Parisians) and the outcasts (the ethnic immigrants), the film also casted light on the dreadful tensions that were generated, intensified and embedded in the society through mistrusts and systematic discriminations.

For example, the phases that Hubert has repeated over and over in the film - “How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!” can be interpreted as a metaphor to express the idea that, it does not matter where you were born, you should only be defined and remembered of who you are by what you have accomplished in life. Which is contradictory and ironic, as most of the immigrants in the film and in real life today still trying to break through the stereotypical glass celling that are attached with their identity. Vinz on the other hand, said: “I feel like an ant in intergalactic space”. This line in particular, also demonstrated the younger generation of immigrant’s sense of feeling lost and the notion to seek for belonging and gaining equal access to resources in a picture perfect European metropolitan