Here are some key questions to consider with the film La Haine: - What cultural stereotypes are being adhered to or subverted? For example, the film subverts stereotypes of France as a place of beauty, art and culture by depicting the grim realities of the banlieues. - How does the film represent France and French culture? It shows a divided France, with stark differences between the wealthy and the impoverished immigrant communities in the banlieues. - Do the characters appear to be influenced by other cultures? Do they identify more with those cultures or with French culture? The multi-ethnic characters draw on aspects of their various backgrounds but ultimately seem most influenced by the culture of their run-

1. Social context: World
cinema
L.O: By the end of the lesson you will understand and be
able to start to discuss the social issues which underpin
the three films we have watched.
To be able to discuss how the understanding of social
context is relevant to understanding the films you have
studied.
Exam section
World cinema
Specialist Study: Urban Stories - Power,
Poverty and Conflict

2. World cinema
Specialist Study: Urban Stories - Power, Poverty and Conflict
• Key idea
• An urban story can be any film in which the
city is a defining presence – in which
characters’ lives are defined by existence
within the urban environment. We will be
looking at films that focus on youth cultures
within the urban environment.

3. Starter task
• What do the following words mean?
• IDEOLOGY
• CULTURE
10 minutes
• POWER
• REPRESENTATION
• URBAN CONFLICT
• POVERTY
• How do you think they are relevant to the films you
have seen? (pick one film)
FILM IDEOLOLOGY CULUTRE POWER REPRESENTATION URBAN POVERTY
CONFLICT
LA HAINE
COG
TSOTSI

4. •IDEOLOGY – a person’s or a society’s set of beliefs and values, or overall way of
looking at the world.
•CULTURE – The way in which forms of human activity and interaction are socially
transmitted/The way of life of a particular human community living in a specific place.
(gang culture, youth culture)
•POWER – The various forms of control some individuals and groups within society
have over other individuals and groups.
•REPRESENTATION – The variety of ways in which individuals and groups are displayed
to audiences within the media and other cultural texts.
•URBAN :An urban area is characterised by higher population density and vast human
features in comparison to areas surrounding it. This means that we are looking at
poverty in a built up and modern area. In the case of the films, it may be that their
environments are trapping them within a cycle of events and behaviours.
•CONFLICT: to fight or contend; do battle.
•POVERTY : The state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of
support; condition of being poor

5. Your answer should be based on a minimum of two films.
Compare the attitudes to poverty conveyed in the films you have studied for this topic. [35]
Or,
Explore how stylistic choices contribute to the representation of the urban experience in the
films you have studied for this topic.
What is the importance of cinematography and/or editing in communicating issues of power,
poverty and conflict in the films you have studied for this topic? [35]
Or,
How far do the films you have studied for this topic challenge the audience, generating debate
about the worlds they represent? [35]
How far does the impact of the films you have studied for this topic depend on distinctive uses of
film techniques? [35]
or
How far do the films you have studied for this topic offer an analysis of the social issues they
present?
To what extent do you think the films you have studied present either clear or ambiguous
messages about the worlds they represent? [35]
or
What is the importance of mise-en-scène and/or sound in creating meaning and generating
response in the films you have studied? [35]

6. Why do we need to know this?
Please review your mark schemes! This means that when we
are researching today, we
need to show understanding
of how the social contexts we
discover are linked to the
ideas and themes in the
films. You should start to be
able to talk with confidence
about them and link them in
with examples from the film.

7. • For the last two lessons you have made notes
on the key areas whilst watching the films:
these ideas link into the social context
Today you are going to research the social context of one of the films
that you have seen. Split into 3 groups.
You will need to prepare a presentation on the social context of the
country the film is from. The aim is to teach the other students in the
class about the social background to the films.
We will be having feedback today and then presenting our overall
findings next week.
You will need to use your sheets to help you from the film screenings.

8. You will be using your sheets from the film screening to
help you.
Below are some key words
Raph, Amy
Sam, charlotte, shannon
Tsotsi
City of god Aisling, Adam
The Aparthied
Favela South Africa
Brazil- Rio La Haine
townships
Poverty Banlieues
Poverty
Crime Paris riots
Crime
Poverty
HIV
Crime

9. What shall I include
• The idea is to create a power point presentation/ or work sheet that can be used
to help other students understand the social context of the films that we have
seen.
• What can you include?
• Images
• You tube videos/ links
• Facts about the countries
• The key theme areas on the sheets we used this week.
• L.O: FROM YOUR SHEET STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL
CONTEXT OF THE FILM.
• (if they were to write about the film’s social context- would they show
understanding of it like the mark scheme suggests?)
Your ideal outcome:
To be able to discuss how the social context is relevant to understanding the key ideas
in the film
To be able to identify the idea that social context is the reason that these films are
made- as a social comment on society. To start to be able to discuss key parts of the
film and how they link in with the social context.

10. What shall I include
• The idea is to create a power point presentation/ or work sheet that can be used
to help other students understand the social context of the films that we have
seen.
• What can you include?
• Images
• You tube videos/ links
• Facts about the countries
• The key theme areas on the sheets we used this week.
• L.O: FROM YOUR SHEET STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL
CONTEXT OF THE FILM.
• (if they were to write about the film’s social context- would they show
understanding of it like the mark scheme suggests?)
Your ideal outcome:
To be able to discuss how the social context is relevant to understanding the key ideas
in the film
To be able to identify the idea that social context is the reason that these films are
made- as a social comment on society. To start to be able to discuss key parts of the
film and how they link in with the social context.

11. Example
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=e
n-GB&v=k-1Z3DfPcXw
Analysis of the setting and
housing situation- ideas of social
status
Awareness of crime and police Poverty
statistics
Differences
between
wealth and
poverty

12. Plenary
• What have you found out from the research into social context?
• How is this relevant to the film that you have studied?
• What do you each need to do to complete the objective and these sheets to use next week in
the lesson?

13. • Home learning: Ensure that your sheet/ power
point hand out is complete to be used next
Wednesday to discuss social context of the
films we have studied.
Each group will be
providing detailed
feedback to the other
members in the class-
Please have your hand
outs printed before the
lesson

14. • Student led feedback on the social context of
the world cinema films

15. City of God La Haine
TSOTSI

16. City of God
• Ross Kemp brazil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5KAsW0m3c
• South africa:
• Apartheid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOA66AOG52M
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlrTtc50PR0 2006
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGOPVhQ5rhs –
louis theroux south africa

17. • France
• http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/642-
la-haine-and-after-arts-politics-and-the-
banlieue

18. Extra information
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWLeAQ8
gnU4
• Ross kemp south africa
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=e
n-GB&v=k-1Z3DfPcXw
• Brazil drugs
• PDF on tsotsi

19. • City of God depicts the growth of organised crime in the Cidade de Deus (City of God) suburb of
Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the '60s and the beginning of the '80s
• Social conditions in Rio:
•Brazil continues to be one of the most economically unequal countries in the world with the top 10
percent of the population earning 50 percent of the national income, while about 34 percent of the
population lives below the poverty line.
•More than 6,000 people where murdered in Rio in 2007
•Census data released in December 2011 by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics)
shows that in 2010, about (6%) of the population lived in slums in Brazil.
•The wealthy middle class live in gated communities with security and are the binary opposition of the
shanty towns shown in city of god.
•The police see it as their job to protect the status quo through control of the underprivileged
•Research done in Brazil back in the late 1990s showed that one person dies every half an hour from a
gun shot.
•Drug trafficking in the city employs over 100,000 people, the same number the city has on its payroll.
•Drugs and guns have become an engrained part of Rio’s culture, as has violence to tourists. There are
frequent stories in the news about holidaymakers being robbed and beaten.
•The rural poor have migrated to the cities but expensive land has meant that they have been forced in
the Favelas.

20. •A Favela is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil
•In the late 18th century, the first settlements were a place where former slaves with no land ownership and no
options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in.
•Even before the first "favela" came into being, poor citizens were pushed away from downtown and forced to live in
the far suburbs.
•Today, there are over 500 favela communities existing within the city of Rio and comprise about a third of the total
population. Five-hundred thousand to 1 million are estimated to live on the hillsides
•Many consider the favelas the source of Rio's urban problems, citing them for crime, violence, promiscuity, family
breakdown and the creation of a culture of poverty. The prevailing view is that the favelas are just a transfer of poverty
form the country to the city and are responsible for the negative effects of over-urbanization.
•Water can be gained from an outlet.
•Only about 50% of the faveladors have access to an in-house toilet facility. From these facilities, sewerage runs
through open ditches and eventually ends up at street level, creating an incredible health hazard.
•Electricity is scarce and very hard to access.
•Rubbish is either incinerated on the hill or brought down to the street where the city is supposed take it away but as
they don’t always do that it can build up on street and also become a source for disease.
•It is very difficult for people to get jobs
•The migrants who live in the favelas are looked down upon. Part of this is due to the fact that the majority of these
migrants are black or mulatto.
•Over 70% of the faveladors are mixed race or black. This compares to less than a third of the rest of the city

21. • Historical context:
• From 1964- 1985- there was military rule, this meant oppositional parties were
suppressed, civil liberties curbed and a strict media censorship policy was
enforced.
• The country was in what we would consider a dictatorship.
• Cidade de Deus, a housing project for Rio's urban poor, was built by the
government in the 60's as a dumping ground for the city's troubled, violent youth.
it became one of the most dangerous spots in the country. It wasn't the state that
made the laws ruling the City, it was the teenage drug lords that ruled the turf,
using violence and the threat of instant death as their law.
• Riddled with a corrupt police force and an out of control drugs and gun culture,
these notorious favelas were governed by their own rules and were a society in
their own right. Youth gangs took over the slums during the 1960s and didn't
relinquish their stronghold until the mid-1980s. Unfettered by the law, the City of
God's youth quickly took up armed robbery, graduating to cocaine dealing in the
1970s, and to mass gang warfare in the early 1980s.

22. La Haine: social context
• What stereotypes would we associate with
French culture and France as a nation?
• Love of art and high culture
• Fine cuisine
• fashion
• Garlic and smelly cheese

23. • The phrase les banlieues has been increasingly used as a
euphemism to describe low-income housing projects in
which mainly French of foreign descent reside.
• les banlieues have become, in popular opinion, in the
media and amongst France's political élites, a stigmatized
space of social fragmentation, racial conflict, (sub)urban
decay, criminality and violence.
• The French word banlieue on the other hand evokes an
entirely different set of connotations - drugs, crime,
delinquency, civil disorder, Islamic fundamentalism and
even terrorism - all of them negative. Les banlieues are not
full of comfortable houses for an affluent middle class, but
are composed, rather, of large high-rise blocks full of the
very poorest of France's population

24. •Racism in France has a longstanding history and remains as a contemporary issue.
•The three main characters of La Haine represent three different scapegoats in French
society – Jews, Blacks of North African descent, and Muslims.
•France’s xenophobia was exemplified by a Jean-Marie Le Pen (leader of the
ultrarightest National Front) statement in 1985 that the “invasion” of immigrants had
passed the “threshold of tolerance.”(Singer, 1985).
•Descendents of these non-European immigrants still find themselves “confronted by
racial and cultural discrimination in the world of work, housing, leisure and electoral
politics.” (Sarabia, 2004)
•“The current tensions result directly from high unemployment and indirectly from
the left’s failure for many years to perform its function as the principled enemy of
every form of racial discrimination.” (Singer, 2004).
•These tensions recently manifested themselves in the form of rioting across French
cities in 2005.
•The spark to the flaming riots was the death of two Arab boys who ran away from the
police and hid in an electrical substation.
•La Haine explores these types of issues surrounding racism and relations of cops and
suburban citizens.

25. 1. La Haine- After the riot- Keith Reader
• Banlieue has come to be short hand for societal woes in France
• Working class areas on the edge of large cities
• Built to replace the shanty towns that were originally there
• Badly run down and house largely unemployed young population with little hope or vision for the future
• Drug dealing, robbery, gang warfare and violence against the police who they hate
• A sense of hopelessness and anger
• Key themes within the Banlieue films
• The importance of the gang or the crowd of friends
• The self enclosed way of life on the estates
• The anxiety about drugs
• Poverty
• Ugliness of the setting
• Solidarity against the police
The ethnic mixture of the group- Vinz, Siad and Hubert, symbolizes the idea of the importance of solidarity against the
police
The banlieue is presented as a desert, with no feeling of public space (consider how the police move them on, or they
are filmed by the TV cameras) and precisous little private space- consider the cramped conditions of the flats that they
live in.
The characters are ejected from nearly every place they go in the film

26. Some key questions to consider with
the film
• What cultural stereotypes are being adhered
to or subverted?
• How does the film represent France and
French culture?
• Do the characters appear to be influenced by
other cultures? Do they identify with French
culture?
• What does the opening and the film as a
whole say about multiculturalism in France?

27. Historical context of the film.
• Kassovitz has said that the idea came to him when a young Zairian, Makome
M'Bowole was shot in 1993. He was killed at point blank range while in police
custody and handcuffed to a radiator. The officer was reported to have been
angered by Makomé's words, and had been threatening him when the gun went off
accidentally.
• Kassovitz wanted the film to be ‘wake up call’ to France about the problems of the
banlieues slums.
• He also wanted to express the feelings of ‘marginalisation’ many immigrant groups
felt as victims of social deprivation in a country that had ignored them for a long
time.
• In addition France was in the middle of period when the extreme ‘far right’ party
Front National (France’s equivalent of the BNP) where gaining support. This is
shown in the scene involving the skinhead.

28. TSOTSI:points from the PDF
• The evidence of poverty and affluence – consider the logo on Pumla
• Dube’s shopping bag that Tsotsi steals to carry the baby off in – ‘Expect
• More’.
• • The evidence of pollution.
• • The evidence that South Africa’s capital Johannesburg and its
• townships are lively, energetic, bustling places.
• • The prominence of crime and violence and the response of the police to
• crime and criminals – however young.
• • The evidence of disease – particularly HIV/Aids (clue: look out for
• posters and also Tsotsi’s flashback memories of his mother)
• • Evidence of mixed communities or highly segregated communities
• (apart from the one white policeman – why is there so little evidence of
• white people in this film – crossing Tsotsi’s path?)
• • The evidence of strong cultural/artistic forces at work in the townships
• (clue: consider the language, music and even the colourful fabrics and
• hanging glass and metal mobiles that Miriam produces in her home to
• help make ends meet.)