The Other Side of Hope

Aki Kaurismäki's The Other Side of Hope (2017) won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale and is among the warmest, most humane films of the Finnish director's late career. The second part of a loose port-city trilogy after Le Havre, it turns his deadpan style, unchanged in its essentials, on the refugee crisis then dominating European politics.

Sherwan Haji plays Khaled, the Syrian asylum-seeker stranded in Helsinki, and Sakari Kuosmanen the lugubrious restaurateur who shelters him, in a film that intercuts their stories with Kaurismäki's trademark mix of flat affect, dry wit and unexpected tenderness. His familiar world of retro jukeboxes, mournful rockabilly and characters who barely change expression frames a pointed, compassionate response to how the continent receives those fleeing war. The comedy never softens the politics; if anything, it sharpens them.

Critics praised its blend of social conscience and Kaurismäki's inimitable melancholy humour, and read it as a furious rebuke to European indifference, delivered without the film ever raising its voice. The Other Side of Hope is funny, sad and kind in roughly equal measure, and it meets a vast crisis at human scale. What it insists on, in its understated way, is simple decency between strangers, and it makes that demand feel both modest and urgent. Late Kaurismäki does not come much better than this.