La Haine (Hate)

If the weather is bad, the screening will take place indoors

Généalogie de la violence (Genealogy of Violence)
Mohamed Bourouissa, France, Algeria, 2024, 15 min. French with English subtitles

Talk with Mohamed Amjahid before the screening

Police violence is a system that shapes the way our societies function. After spending more than ten years researching the structures behind this violence, I came to understand how powerful police organizations impact our daily lives. In the film. La Haine (Hate) by French writer and director Mathieu Kassovitz, I see an excellent artistic translation of this phenomenon: state-organized violence determines who is happy, who can live in prosperity and peace, and who must die. The interwoven stories of the characters in the film offer a closer look at the lives of young people — especially racialized and marginalized young men — in the suburbs of post-colonial France. This is a society that fails to confront its past and present, and thus reflects the broader European value system that shapes the continent’s political decisions. A system of violence that I have to witness on a daily basis in my journalistic research. (MA)

La Haine will be preceded by a screening of Mohamed Bourouissa’s 2024 short, Généalogie de la violence. An indiscriminate police search rendered as a 3D scan becomes the scene for an exploration of racially motivated violence and broader questions of bodily autonomy.

Mohamed Amjahid is a freelance investigative journalist specialising in police violence and human rights violations against refugees in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. He writes for several German media such as Spiegel, Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR or SWR. His last book “All just Individual Cases? The System behind Police Violence” was published in September 2024.