A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, August 7, 2026

The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, 2017)

Sherwan Haji, Nuppu Koivu, Janne Hyytiäinen, Sakari Kuosmanen, and Ilkka Koivula in The Other Side of Hope

Cast: Sherwan Haji, Sakari Kuosmanen, Ilkka Koivula, Nuppu Koivu, Janne Hyytiäinen, Kaija Pakarinen, Niroz Haji, Simon Hussein Al-Bazoon. Screenplay: Aki Kaurismäki. Cinematography: Timo Salminen. Art direction: Markku Pätilä. Film editing: Samu Heikkilä. 

Maybe only Aki Kaurismäki could take a story about a serious problem like the refugee crisis with occasional moments of violence and turn it into a droll, heart-warming comedy like The Other Side of Hope. Khaled (Sherwan Haji) has escaped from the civil war in Syria and found his way across Europe to Finland, where after his application for asylum is denied, he takes to the streets of Helsinki. He is found hiding behind the garbage cans of the restaurant owned by Waldemar Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) and taken in, given a job and a fake ID. Then all that's left for Khaled to do is find his sister, Miriam (Niroz Haji), from whom he was separated during their escape from Syria. The straight-faced performances of the cast, including Waldemar's three employees, give this perhaps improbable, melodramatic, even sentimental (there's also a cute dog) tale its special piquant charm. It's probably best to be familiar already with Kaurismäki's other movies about deadpan Finns in challenging situations to appreciate this one's unique character. But who else could give you a movie in which a Finnish restaurant decides to serve sushi, and when it runs out of the right fish substitutes salted herring? (They figure if they use enough wasabi no one will notice.)  



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