It’s the story of a guy who falls from the 50th floor of a building. The guy, on his way down, repeats to himself “so far so good… so far so good”. But the most important thing isn’t the fall, it’s the landing.

This quote is from the 1995 French film La Haine, about a day in the lives of three young men from a deprived housing estate in the suburbs of Paris. It was written in response to the riots that paralysed France in 1993. Last year, angry and disenfranchised Parisian youths flocked from the suburbs to the city centre again, to try to take on a system that is keeping them in a borderland state: a state of quasi exclusion, both geographic and social.

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