Other Side of Hope
It's at once honest and artful, a touching and clearsighted declaration of faith in people and in movies.
The Other Side of Hope
This wry, melancholic comedy from Aki Kaurismäki, a clear-eyed response to the current refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a place to call home. Displaced Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) lands in Helsinki as a stowaway; meanwhile, middle-aged salesman Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves behind his wife and job and buys a conspicuously unprofitable seafood restaurant. After Khaled is denied asylum, he decides not to return to Aleppo—and the paths of the two men cross fortuitously. As deadpan as the best of the director’s work, and with a deep well of empathy for its down-but-not-out characters (many of them played by members of Kaurismäki's ever-reliable stock company), The Other Side of Hope is a bittersweet tale of human kindness in the face of official indifference.
Genre
Comedy,
Drama
Runtime
98
Language
Finnish,
English,
Arabic,
Swedish
Director
Aki Kaurismäki
Cast
Sherwan Haji,
Sakari Kuosmanen
Awards:
Winner, Silver Bear, Berlin International Film Festival
Winner, FIPRESCI Film of the Year, San Sebastián International Film Festival
FEATURED REVIEW
Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Village Voice
In the year that’s somehow still not over, 2017 has relentlessly imposed its social and political context upon how we consume and interpret art. It’s become an exhausting cop-out by this point — evaluating the worth of films based on their timeliness or how they offer an escape from reality. And so ...
Played at
Playhouse 7 12.09.17 - 12.17.17
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