la haine & City of god

Compare the attitudes to poverty conveyed in the films you have studied for this topic.



    In this film through out attitudes towards poverty are conveyed in different ways through different point of views. One way in which these attitudes towards poverty are portrayed is through the separation of classes; upper class and lower class.

The film is set in France in an area which is promptly a lower class way of living. The youth live on estates and continuously are shown literally doing nothing, no sort of education is present in the way they live. The group of youths are shown just hanging around the estate surrounded by crime. Further into the film you see how the youth who live this sort of lifestyle are portrayed through the media, in the scene where a tv company comes to the estate where Vinz, Hubert and Said are shown, in a long shot where the depth of field is in focus portraying how the boys fit into their environment, sitting around pretty much doing nothing where behind them in the background the Tv van pulls up and begins to provoke the boys by asking them questions about the riots that have been happening in their area. Then going into a medium shot of Said in the middle and then Vinz and Hubert coming up behind him from each side, this portrays the idea that Hubert and Vinz are the ones who are kept together by Said, also out of the three boys Vinz is the first one who reacts after Said when he says "do we look like thugs to you?" and answers back to the reporter, reinforcing the idea that Vinz is the more aggressive out of the three and the one who enjoys the conflict as he backs up Said before Hubert does, then Hubert is the last one who talks back to the reporters saying "get out the car this isn't thiory". Making reference to a zoo, inferring how the media don't actually care about the way they live in crime and poverty but just exploiting them to look how society wants to see youths of today as bad people, the tv presenting the attitudes of todays society towards these youth who are stuck in the cycle of poverty.

Another way in which attitudes towards poverty are conveyed through out la haine is shown in the corruption of police. This is evident in the scene which shows the treatment of the two youths Said and Hubert in Paris, because of both their ethnicity and the fact they know they youths come from a background of poverty. The police's attitudes towards them is different to how it would be if they were dealing with upper class people, but because they are lower class they can treat them how they want because nobody would care and everyone has the same attitude towards the youths who live in poverty as they believe they deserve this treatment, as it is stereotyped that male youths living in poverty have no morals themselves for other people and that they only live a life of crime, being against the law. In this scene you see how the police treat the youths like animals and one of the officers make a racist comment to Hubert ".


City of god
Compare the attitudes to poverty conveyed in the films you have studied for this topic.


In the film there are many examples of how attitudes towards poverty are conveyed one of these examples being the montage of the flat where drugs are produced. In this scene you see it starts off as a women called "Dona Zelia" who, when she ran the flat, sold weed to the people living in the city of god just as an amateur. Then the montage develops into the time of when 'big boy' took over using the kids of the neighbourhood to deliver the drugs, this shows the beginning of the cycle of poverty which goes round in the favelas starting at such a young age, just as big boy started off at the bottom going up to dealers, to managers to now running the flat and gaining the power, as big boys close friend 'Carrot' did when he worked his way up to manager. The montage showing to generations of different people having control of the flat portrays the idea of how people living in poverty depended on this type of lifestyle to be able to survive. As if you lived in these favelas you would not be able to get a real job as it was unlikely employers would give them a chance, therefore displaying what attitudes in the city were towards people living in poverty being untrustworthy. As the montage continues the lighting in the flat begins to become much darker lighting and gloomy, just as the drugs that are being sold in the flat become more aggressive from selling weed to harder drugs like cocaine. This suggesting how poverty was worsening in the favelas becoming a more run down, dangerous place for people to live.