‘banlieue’ means suburbs, outskirts
'Banlieue filmmaking refers to the work of directors aiming to represent life in the deprived housing estates on the outskirts of big French cities. 'Cinéma de banlieue emerged within French film criticism in the mid-1990s as a way of categorising a series of independently released films set in the rundown multi-ethnic working-class estates (the cités) on the periphery of France's major cities (the banlieues), the most significant of which was Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995)' (Tarr 2005: 2).
Banlieue films represent the social problems of the fracture sociale, the increasing disparity between haves and have-nots in contemporary French society. This usually involves the depiction of multi-ethnic youth culture. La Haine, for example, centres on a black-beur-blanc trio of unemployed youths.
Cf. also Beur cinema
Carrie Tarr (2005), Reframing Difference: Beur and banlieue filmmaking in France, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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