Pay a visit to Kaurismäki’s unique cinematic universe, where melodrama meets minimalism and bitter reality is tempered with deadpan comedy.
Read full descriptionBAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A Syrian refugee adrift in Helsinki finds an unlikely ally in a sullen restaurateur in Kaurismäki’s delightfully humanizing take on immigration. “At once honest and artful, a touching and clear-sighted declaration of faith in people and in movies” (New York Times).
This grimly funny gender parable stars Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen in “a beautiful, unsentimental performance . . . deeply realized and affecting” (New York Times). With short Those Were the Days.
Forget Puccini: Kaurismäki delivers his own ironic yet improbably sincere take on Henri Murger’s novel of bohemians struggling to sustain themselves, their loves, and their art in a timelessly shabby Paris.
An amnesiac finds comfort with a dour Salvation Army soup-slinger in Kaurismäki’s “comedy of losers,” a look into the heart of poverty and the warmth of humanity. “At once artful, accessible . . . hilarious and humane” (New York Times).
Imported 35mm Print
An unemployed couple strive to make a new life for themselves in Kaurismäki’s tale of economic dislocation painted in shades of blue. The moral of this touching, deadpan fable: “Life is short and miserable. Be merry while you can.”
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!
A Syrian refugee adrift in Helsinki finds an unlikely ally in a sullen restaurateur in Kaurismäki’s delightfully humanizing take on immigration. “At once honest and artful, a touching and clear-sighted declaration of faith in people and in movies” (New York Times).
Kaurismäki depicts the intersecting (mis)fortunes of a refugee from Gabon and a shoeshine man in the French port of the title. “A love letter to France, in particular to a half-imaginary, half-vanished realm of proletarian Frenchness” (New York Times).