LA HAINE Film Screening + discussion

A landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis followed by a discussion
About this Event

Special Revival Screening + Panel Discussion

LA HAINE (1995, Janus Films, 97 min. Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz)

Mathieu Kassovitz took the film world by storm with LA HAINE, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (the great Vincent Cassel, from IRREVERSIBLE and BLACK SWAN), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis – notes courtesy of Janus Films.

Discussion following moderated by The 418 Project board member Amber Wyld and special guests including Dr. Muriam Haleh Davis, Dr. Camille Hawthorne and Dr. Thomas Serres on issues raised by LA HAINE on racism and identity, financial hardship, alienation, and immigrant communities being terrorized by law enforcement.

Dr. Muriam Haleh Davis is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA) at UCSC. Her first book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Duke University Press, 2022), investigated how Islam served as a racial category in colonial Algeria. She has written widely on the issues of racism and Islamophobia in France. In addition to her academic publications, her analysis has been featured on France 24, Al Jazeera English, Truth Out, Public Books and the LA Review of Books. She is currently writing a book on the anti-colonial revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon, with a focus on how his works were debated in Algeria after independence. In addition to co-teaching a Global Seminar on Mediterranean France in Marseille, she regularly teaches classes on the French Empire and Race in Europe.

Dr. Camilla Hawthorne (they/she) is a writer, researcher, educator, and multidisciplinary artist. They are Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz, founder and co-facilitator of the UCSC Black Geographies Lab, and program director of the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Camilla is the author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022) and co-editor of The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and Heartbreak and Other Geographies: Collected Works of Katherine McKittrick (University of Minnesota Press, 2026). Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Ragusa Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Leonardo Da Vinci Society, and the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North American Foundation. Camilla is also a classically trained pianist who performs on accordion and aerial hoop...and sometimes both, at the same time! As a performer, Camilla is interested in bridging their practice as a circus artist and musician with their academic work on radical Black diasporic cultural politics—for instance, by conducting extensive research on the life of actor-singer-dancer-activist Eartha Kitt and recounting her story through burlesque and aerial dance; translating James Baldwin’s writings in The Fire Next Time into an aerial piece about revolutionary love; and exploring musical genealogies of antifascism through an experimental performance blending aerial hoop, Italian accordion music, and 1990s British anarchist punk rock. She has performed at venues such as San Francisco Circus Center, The Great Star, Motion Pacific, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the 418 Project, Santa Cruz Dancing in the Streets, Moe's Alley, and the Felton Music Hall, with companies including Circus of the Moon and Central Coast Circus. Camilla is also collaborating with Ben Leeds Carson, Perre Di Carlo, and Michael Chemers on a Star Trek opera, and with Christina Zanfagna, John Gennari, and Michael Whalen on a feature-length documentary film entitled BLACKITALIAN. She is also a Participating Artist at The 418 Project for 2026 / 2027.

Dr. Thomas Serres is an associate professor of Politics at UCSC. His research spans the fields of Middle Eastern Studies, Critical Security Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. His first monograph, The Suspended Disaster: Governance by Catastrophization in Bouteflika’s Algeria, was published in 2023 by Columbia University Press. He is currently working on a new book project that connects the rise of authoritarian liberalism in France with the emergence of a radical anticolonial and antiracist movement that breaks with previous modes of race management. Part of this project aims to understand the transnational dynamics shaping this political and racial restructuring, from the Maghreb to Palestine.

Tickets: $10 advance / $15 at the door.

Doors open at 7PM, film at 7:30 PM at The 418 Project, 155 South River Street, downtown Santa Cruz at the Dragons Gate.