Here is the Curzon Soho introduction to this special screening:
The Other Side of Hope is the latest film from Aki Kaurismäki (Lights in the Dusk, The Man Without a Past, I Hired a Contract Killer), for which he won the Silver Bear award for Best Director at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival. We preview this hotly anticipated film, showing exclusively at Curzon Soho on 35mm. This is also a unique chance to see The Other Side of Hope in a double bill with its companion piece, Kaurismäki’s 2011 Le Havre, also on 35mm. The Other Side of Hope tells the interlinked stories of Wikström, card-shark travelling salesman (Sakari Kuosmanen) and Khaled, a Syrian refugee (Sherwan Haji). The all-too timely film depicts Khaled’s struggle with authorities in Finland and abuse by white nationalists in his adopted land.The themes of the film are offset by rockabilly bands, buskers, some ill-advised cuisine and the clean precision of Kaurismäki’s trademark visual comedy. In Le Havre, an apt mirror to The Other Side of Hope, a self-imposed exile befriends and protects a young boy who has arrived illegally in the eponymous French maritime city.
Chicago Reader review of Le Havre:
In the Northern French port city of the title, an elderly shoe shiner calls on his circle of working-poor friends to help him protect a young African refugee from getting deported. Aki Kaurismaki, making his first French feature since La Vie de Boheme (1992), presents his story as a modern-day fairy tale: the people in the community all know each other and every character proves reliably compassionate in a crisis. The film is especially comforting if you love old movies, as Kaurismaki does: his deadpan humor and deliberately flattened images evoke silent comedy, as usual, and his rosy depiction of proletarian camaraderie recalls the 30s and 40s work of Marcel Carné (particularly Le Jour se Leve). Many of the music selections and character names allude to Carné too.
Ben Sachs
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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