Next in the Center for Contemporary Art’s Closer Looks: Cinema + Conversation series is French director Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995, not rated, 98 minutes) on Thursday, December 14, at 6 p.m.

Kassovitz took the film world by storm with La Haine, a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income outskirts of Paris. Aimlessly passing their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, vinz( vincent cass el ), hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) give human faces to france’ s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches 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.

The film was selected by one of the series’ curators, David N. Meyer, who writes: “Winner of the Palm d’or and Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and of the César — France’s Oscars — for Best Picture, this is where the revolution begins. Teenage best friends – one African, one Arab, one Jew – live bored, desperate lives in the banlieue, the high-rise ghetto encircling Paris. During an anti-police riot, one of the friends steals a cop’s gun — death incarnate. La Haine follows the trio’s dire and hilarious adventures around Paris — a city on a knife-edge as police battle the banlieue kids. Director Kassovitz’s groundbreaking, thrilling B/W camera movement, street dialogue, and gritty realism is a lightning bolt, a youthquake, a cry of rage.”

Closer Looks is an in-depth cinema series curated by award-winning filmmaker and editor Paul Barnes, film critic and writer David N. Meyer, and founder/ programmer of the local microcinema No Name Cinema, Justin Clifford Rhody. The series showcases a broad range of classic films, all unified by their integral contribution to the history of cinema as an art form. Each film screening begins with an in-depth talk and slideshow about the film and is followed by a conversation between the presenters and the audience about the qualities and importance of the film.