‘Photography is truth. Cinema is truth 24 frames per second.’¹ Godard’s influence on the French new Wave movement was vast, with films such as ‘Vivre Sa Vie’, (1962), and ‘A Woman is a Woman’, (1961): films that explore the more underground and bleak backstories of characters, applying this to audience’s real lives. His most memorable piece, however, came out in 1960 and started this trend of his films embodying more dark-sided crime stories- this film was called ‘Breathless’, and detailed the goofy, crime accompanied romance between a criminal and his American lover. Its influence on cinema spread vastly, and this study will examine its influence on later 90s French Cinema, where much of French New Wave’s techniques and conventions were replicated. The 1990s ‘young realists’ movement took from French New Wave immensely, especially its reference of crime and normalisation of darker themes such as drug use which though rarely appeared in French New Wave films, carried the same effects as a character casually carrying a gun around Paris as Patricia does.² This study will compare the conventions of French New Wave between the classic ‘Breathless’ by Godard, and the young realist film ‘La Haine’, (1995), by director Kassovitz. The two films compare mainly in 3 distinct attributes that will be addressed: Cinematography and Style, Themes and Narrative and finally sound and editing.