Every country has a thing. Canada’s thing is politeness, and, to a lesser extent, milk sold in bags. Australia’s thing is its terrifying diversity of lethal fauna. England’s thing is being better than America, or maybe crumpets. America’s thing might outwardly appear to be racially charged displays of public violence. Regrettably, however, such occurrences are not restricted to the United States. Which I suppose leaves America’s thing as… obesity? Or maybe superhero movies. But today, that’s neither here nor there.

Back in January, France felt the sting of ideologically motivated violence when al-Qaeda affiliates Saïd and Chérif Kouachi opened fire at the offices of Parisian satire newspaper Charlie Hebdo in response to anti-Islamist cartoons, killing 12 and harming 11 more. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Paris-born actor Vincent Cassel mentioned that the act of terrorism resonated with him in a very personal way. He harkened back to his controversial 1995 film La Haine, which he signed on for in an effort to bring the roiling racial tensions in urban Paris to light.

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, the film follows three street toughs—one white, one black, and one Arab Maghrebi—over a single day as they show off in an attempt to prove their toughness to one another, their enemies, and themselves. Kassovitz’s film foregrounds the youth violence along racial lines that continues to run rampant even today. Earlier this month, Kassovitz told French press he was considering directing a sequel; in the Guardian interview, Cassel stated that, sadly, the time may be ripe: “When Mathieu decided to do La Haine, it was because he was shocked by the assassination of a kid in a police station. Suddenly, he felt like he had something to say about it. Maybe with everything that has happened lately, that might happen to him again.”

The “assassination” incident that Cassel refers to was really more like an execution—Zairean national Makome M’Bowole was shot to death at point-blank range while handcuffed to a radiator in police custody in 1993. It’s a horrifying yet all-too-familiar story, the sort that has only made La Haine more urgently prophetic as the years have ticked by. The actual likelihood of Kassovitz returning to La Haine is somewhat slim; the man hasn’t directed a film since 2011, taking only a handful of acting gigs since. But Cassel brings up a good point—that the time has never been better for a successor to his film’s white-hot denunciations of hate crime. Considering the staggering mountains of flak that the radical but peaceable Selma took upon its release, any film in the spirit of La Haine would most likely face a lot of pushback. Which, you could argue, is exactly why we need it.