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 stands among the most warmly humane films of the Finnish master's late career. The second part of a loose port-city trilogy after Le Havre, it brings his deadpan style to bear on Europe's refugee crisis.

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. The director's familiar world — retro jukeboxes, mournful rockabilly, characters who barely change expression — frames a pointed, compassionate response to how the continent receives those fleeing war. The comedy never softens the politics; it sharpens them.

Critics praised its blend of social conscience and Kaurismäki's inimitable melancholy humour, reading it as a quietly furious rebuke to European indifference. Funny, sad and kind in equal measure, The Other Side of Hope is essential late Kaurismäki — a film that meets a vast crisis at human scale, and insists, in its understated way, on simple decency between strangers. Kaurismäki's deadpan compassion turns a vast crisis into something intimate and humane, and the film stands as one of European cinema's most quietly pointed responses to how the continent receives those fleeing war.