UPDATE 2/13
:  Sadly, due to circumstances beyond his control, Mr. Kassovitz has been forced to cancel his appearance.  We wish him well and look forward to rescheduling this event.

La Haine poster image
Dodge College is proud to welcome director Mathieu Kassovitz to the Folino stage this Thursday evening, in conjunction with the 
Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
  Professor Veronique Olivier of the French Department has graciously arranged for a series of special events to welcome the director/writer/actor, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Our talented guest, who you may recognize from
Amelie
,
The Fifth Element
,
Munich
, or one of his other starring roles, has spent just about as much time behind the camera as in front of it.  He’s credited with being an actor, director, writer, editor, producer — even a camera operator.  In the highlight of the evening, the masterclass, he’s going to share this unique blend of perspective and experience with the Chapman community!  The master class begins at 5PM and is open to all Dodge College students.

After the master class, we will screen his most critically acclaimed work,
La Haine

(Hate)
, on a retouched Criterion Collection bluray, from 7-10PM. 
La Haine
is a gritty, provocative portrait of life on the streets in mid-90’s France;  it’s beautifully shot, with a careful compositional eye and a punchy stop-and-go rhythm, but it’s also incredibly unnerving, contrasting wanton violence with more delicate, emotionally-charged vignettes.  (If you can stomach violence, I
highly
recommend it – it’s been a personal favorite of mine, right up there with
Kids
and
Rumble Fish
as a gripping coming of age story).

Dean of Students Michael Kowalski calls it ”
Mean Streets
meets 
Boyz n the Hood,
” and shared this plot setting:

LA HAINE Film PosterWhen 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 Saïd—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.

Hugely influenced by American directors like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee (particularly Do the Right Thing), La Haine riffs through different styles and techniques, yet the movie feels organic and whole, driven by a genuinely passionate point of view. Dynamic, reckless, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle (and sometimes both), this is a must-see.


Check out the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk77VrkxL88

Following the screening, Mr. Kassovitz will stay to take questions from the audience during a Q&A, slated to begin approximately at 10PM.

I hope you can all make it out Thursday night to welcome this accomplished international star, and to take in some already-classic, modern global cinema!