La Haine (Criterion) DVD

• 2.0 Dolby Digital (French)
• Introduced by Jodie Foster
• New documentary that reunites the cast and crew
• New featurette that covers the film's banlieue setting
• English language director's commentary
• Behind-the-scenes footage
• Deleted/extended scenes with a director afterword
• Behind-the-scenes stills gallery
• Theatrical trailers
• Essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau & filmmaker Costa-Gavras

Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, Saïd Taghmaoui, Francois Levantal, Edouard Montoute

When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La Haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris's outskirts. Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz, Hubert, and Said - a Jew, an African, and an Arab - give human faces to France's immigrant populations, their bristling resentments at their social marginalization slowly simmering until they reach 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.