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Cinema Explorations: The Other Side of Hope
March 17, 2018 – March 18, 2018
$5 – $9
To be shown Saturday and Sunday at 10:00 a.m.
Aki Kaurismäki’s wry, melancholic comedy, a clear-eyed response to the current refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a new life. Displaced Syrian Khaled has escaped war-ravaged Aleppo and lands in Helsinki as a stowaway; meanwhile, middle-aged salesman Wikström leaves behind his wife and work using poker winnings to buy a conspicuously unprofitable seafood restaurant. After Khaled is denied asylum, he eludes deportation to Aleppo — and fortuitously the paths of the two men cross.
As deadpan as the best of the director’s work with a deep well of empathy for its down-but-not-out characters (many played by Kaurismäki’s ever-reliable stock company), the film is a bittersweet tale of human kindness in the face of official indifference.
“The issue of migrants and refugees [may] still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze, [but] not Kaurismäki’s cinema…. His humane comedy [has] absorbed this idea, [and] in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity.” —Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.
In Finnish, English, Arabic with English subtitles. (PG, 101 min.)
Admission: $9 for adults, $5 for students.