Reel Islington, Resource for London, 356 Holloway Rd, London, N7 6PA, 2pm
This screens as part of the Reel Islington film festival. Full details can be found here.
Here is their introduction:
This French film raises issues about police brutality, criminality and disaffected youth in the surburbs of Paris that are relevant in cities across the world. The film will be followed by a discussion of the themes raised by the film, with a focus on how they manifest in the Islington and Holloway community. There will also be a short presentation by Richard Frankland from Prospex.
Richard “Beef” Frankland is the CEO of Prospex, a youth work charity based in Holloway North London. He has been involved in Youth Work for over 30 years in various ways from volunteering to full time. His youth work experience has seen him run youth clubs, work in uniformed organisations, as the Youth Pastor at Morden Baptist Church, teaching RE and music in a primary school, detached work, social action projects in the UK and abroad and running Prospex since 2007. Prospex works with disadvantaged young people through its Street Teams, Youth Hubs and One2One support and works with around 360 young people on a weekly basis.
Time Out review:
Twenty-four hours in the Paris projects: an Arab boy is critically wounded in hospital, gut-shot, and a police revolver has found its way into the hands of a young Jewish skinhead, Vinz (Cassel), who vows to even the score if his pal dies. Vinz hangs out with Hubert (Koundé) and Saïd (Taghmaoui). They razz each other about films, cartoons, nothing in particular, but always the gun hovers over them like a death sentence, the black-and-white focal point for all the hatred they meet with, and all they can give back. Kassovitz has made only one film before (the droll race-comedy Métisse), but La Haine puts him right at the front of the field: this is virtuoso, on-the-edge stuff, as exciting as anything we've seen from the States in ages, and more thoroughly engaged with the reality it describes. He combats the inertia and boredom of his frustrated antagonists with a thrusting, jiving camera style which harries and punctuates their rambling, often very funny dialogue. The politics of the piece are confrontational, to say the least, but there is a maturity and depth to the characterisation which goes beyond mere agitprop: society may be on the point of self-combustion, but this film betrays no appetite for the explosion. A vital, scalding piece of work.
Tom Charity
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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