Is the future really theirs?: Riots in the Paris suburbs circa 1995 - La Haine

Watched the 1990s French film La Haine (Hate), (dir M Kassovitz, looked it up) which seems especially on point today - about the street demonstrations and the thug life in the Paris banlieux (sp?), the suburbs that, in the reverse of the American topography, house the poor, the immigrants, the outcast. Film begins with terrific documentary footage of the street riots and clashes w/ police outside Paris and then breaks into a narrative, beginning on the morning after the riots w/ one of the rioters in critical condition in a local hospital. We follow 3 guys - late teens, early 20s, affiliates through a loose gang association w/ the guy in the hospital - and we follow the 3 over the next 24 hours as they get in various scrapes, commit a # of crimes, beginning with the petty and building in gravity and intensity; a lot revolves around a gun that one of the gendarmes lost during the riots and that one of the 3 guys has found - this seems so odd to us in American, where half the people on the streets probably own guns legally - and, as all movie and theater-goers know, if you show us a gun in the first act, someone will have to shoot it in the 3rd. It's a really dark movie about these three estranged and somewhat dangerous guys, representative of an entire culture; though one is Arab (the others are black and Jewish), this movie predated the age of terrorism and the culture clash with the vast Muslim community in and around Paris - it's nonideological and a little dated in that sense. There's some humor, at times, but dark and vulgar and sexist humor - at times it reminded me of the young toughs in Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, but it doesn't really build in us much sympathy for these characters (the black guy maybe an exception - he's been trying to rise above his circumstances) and we know little - intentionally - about their families, education, aspirations. They scrawl on walls the slogan "The Future is Ours" - but it's just a slogan. They seem to have no thoughts beyond the present moment.