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. The first part of his loose port-city trilogy, it is among the most charming and openly hopeful films of his career.

André Wilms plays Marcel Marx, the genial old bohemian-turned-shoeshiner who hides a young Gabonese refugee while his wife (Kati Outinen) lies in hospital, in a film that transposes Kaurismäki's deadpan Finnish style to a storybook France of brightly painted bars and improbable solidarity. The director stages the tale of a community closing ranks to protect a child as a kind of secular fable, complete with a benevolent policeman and a deus ex machina that he embraces without irony.

Critics were won over by its warmth and its quietly pointed stance on Europe's treatment of migrants, finding in its artificiality a deliberate, fairy-tale grace. Funny, gentle and unfashionably optimistic, Le Havre is Kaurismäki imagining the kindness he wishes the continent would show. It remains one of the most disarming films about the refugee experience, told with deadpan tenderness. Its deliberate, fairy-tale artificiality is the point — Kaurismäki imagining the decency he wishes Europe would show — and it remains one of the most disarming films ever made about the refugee experience.