922 - The Other Side of Hope (2017)

Perhaps the most Finnish way to make a love letter to Finland is to make a movie that emphasizes a kind of remote inhabitability of a place and its people.  No really: this movie about a deadpan population, their apathetic bureaucracy, an undercurrent of white nationalism in the streets of Helsinki, frigid weather, and truly unappetizing-looking food.  And somehow under the direction of Aki Kaurismäki, the viewer - along with the lead character of a Syrian refugee struggling to survive in a cold, seemingly lifeless nation that doesn’t want him there - is inevitably charmed by a nation we slowly learn to be more accurately characterized as emotionally reserved, but earnest.  Distrustful, but generous.  Suspicious and guarded, but maybe ultimately welcoming.

If you’d like to watch ahead for next week’s film, we will be discussing and reviewing Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936).