French cult film ‘La Haine’ returns as hip-hop musical with tensions persisting in poor suburbs

Watching “La Haine” nearly 30 years ago, there was a sense of something inexorable about violence in the French suburbs.

French director Mathieu Kassovitz’s critically acclaimed black-and-white film opens with video images of news footage of urban riots. The film then follows three friends — Hubert, Vinz and Saïd — over the course of 24 hours in a world of police brutality. It ends with the killing of one of the young men by a…