Le Havre

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) competed for the Palme d'Or, won the international critics' FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes and took the Louis Delluc Prize, a rare honour for a Finnish director working in French. It is the first part of his loose port-city trilogy, and among the most charming and openly hopeful films of his career.

André Wilms plays Marcel Marx, a genial old bohemian turned shoeshine man who hides a young Gabonese refugee while his wife (Kati Outinen) lies in hospital. Kaurismäki transposes his deadpan Finnish style to a storybook France of brightly painted bars and improbable solidarity. He tells the story of a community closing ranks to protect a child as a kind of secular fable, and he embraces the fable's conventions without a trace of irony.

Critics were won over by its warmth and its pointed stance on Europe's treatment of migrants, and found a deliberate, fairy-tale grace in its artificiality. Funny, gentle and unfashionably optimistic, Le Havre is Kaurismäki imagining the kindness he wishes the continent would show. Told with deadpan tenderness, it is one of the most disarming films about the refugee experience. The artifice is the whole point: this is Kaurismäki picturing the decency he wishes Europe would show, and putting it on screen as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.