In short: the unique talent of Kaurismaki’s is that his films are social in content, perfect in form, as well as funny and touching on the emotional level. No one of other today’s filmmakers is able to repeat this combination. He sees reality with a sober and yet compassionate gaze. He hates the government, the police, and unscrupulous capitalists. His characters are proletarians, peasants, small businessmen, homeless or marginalized, the common people, the small Finnish people – they are fighting for their truth one way or another and often win. His humor is as discreet as it is accurate. His actors play with the utmost brevity of gestures and words, but their characters are perfectly tailored.
All this fully applies to the new work by Kaurismaki: The Other Side of Hope (Germany – Finland), which won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the last Berlin Film Festival.
The Other Side of Hope is a story of a Syrian refugee named Khaled (Sherwan Haji), who is trying to get asylum in Finland and also looking for his sister. Kaurismaki has already taken the topic of illegal immigrants in his Le Havre (2011), but this time he explores it deeper, with active foreigner characters. Partly, the film is similar to the most titled Kaurismaki’s picture The Man without a Past (2002, Grand Prix of the Cannes festival) – it also features a poor traveler, attacked by a street rabble (skinheads in the new film) and who gets help from ordinary townspeople; there’s even a dog that becomes friends with Khaled.
Another parallel plotline portrays an attempt by several Finns to build a successful restaurant business. The author has no compassion in sneering at his compatriots. And it turns out extremely clever: dialogs and funny situations – with absolutely deadpan facial expressions of actors – has always been a strong side of Kaurismaki the writer. It is important that the director was successful in creating the image of migrants – it was definitely a challenge, because such intercultural subjects, related to a culture unknown to the author, always pose a danger in terms of the story’s truthfulness. However, both the Finns and the Arabs are equally convincing in the Kaurismaki’s new film. As for the matter of the movie’s audial and visual texture – featuring deep, painting-like chiaroscuro, charming old-fashioned analog filming technique, and the brilliant soundtrack full of first-rate blues and rock-and-rolls – it was a real consolation in the frankly boring Berlinale competition.
Finally, The Other Side of Hope ends well; and it happens not because of the desire to make a happy-end at any price, but because of the conscious gesture of the artist, who is passionate about the injustice of the world and at the same time believes in people.
After the festival premiere, Aki Kaurismaki met with the press. The Day’s correspondent had his turn on the questions.
This is your second film in the planned trilogy about port cities after Le Havre. What are your hopes for this project?
“Since I’m basically absolutely lazy, I have to make a trilogy, always, to do something. I couldn’t cut wood, that’s all. And then it suddenly came, I turned from my harbor trilogy to a refugee trilogy. Now it’s not a harbor trilogy anymore, it’s a refugee trilogy, and I hope that one will be a happy comedy.”
You said earlier that you wanted to change the audience’s beliefs about refugees…
“I was very modest starting with changing the audience. I want to change the world (laughs). But my manipulative abilities are not good enough, so I think I have to limit it to changing Europe. We’ll start with Europe, then we’ll go to Asia.”
But is it really possible to change the Finns’s opinions – or, say, that of the right-wing parties, which are now on the rise in Europe? Is it possible to tell them that they are the same people as we are, they want to work, to live, and if we give them that chance, they may as well teach us something interesting, like it happened with a multicultural restaurant in your film?
“Yeah, of course everybody has to have dreams, and I have a dream, and at first I wanted to change the minds of Finnish people, and I might or might not succeed. But when suddenly to Finland, which is fairly a one-people country, came 30,000 young Iraqis, the young Finnish (and all the Finnish men) took it as a war. ‘Someone was attacking us,’ like Russia 70 years ago. And the attitude towards the refugees was unbearable, in my opinion: that they will steal my new car, or something. If not my car, then the brush with which I polish my car, but anyway, they’ll steal something. And I certainly didn’t like to see that kind of attitude in my compatriots.
“But the question about the restaurant interests me more. Jean Renoir said that with his La Grande Illusion he tried to stop the Second World War. Later he said, ‘It was a lousy failure, I couldn’t stop it.’ Cinema doesn’t have such influence. But I’m honest trying to force these three people who go to see this film to realize that we are all same, we are all human, and tomorrow it will be you who will be the refugee. Today it’s him or her. [Applause.]”
What do you think about the Islamization of Europe?
“Because Iceland was a bit cool at football once doesn’t mean it has to be the ‘Icelandization of Europe’ (laughs). I don’t know who wrote that thing once, after the Second World War: ‘when they took my neighbor I didn’t say a word, when they took my cousin I didn’t say a word, when they took my mother I didn’t say a word, and when they took me, there wasn’t anybody to say anything because I was the last one.’ Maybe Stefan Zweig.
“So I can’t see any Islamization in Europe. It’s a normal cultural changing which we need, because our blood is getting thick. Let’s go back to Sevilla in 1492. Total peace with all the religions and everything. Business went well for everybody, and then Isabella I and Ferdinand II decided that we had to get them out [director means the Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. – Ed.]. And we rushed everybody out. We can make laws to hide the crimes we made behind the laws.”
In this context, why did you choose this name? What message did you want to convey with it?
“I never meant anything in my life (laughs). I head a working title called “Refugee” which is a very clear title, but it’s not very poetic. The husband of my assistant found somewhere a two-thousand-year old Greek poem, “The Other Side of Hope.” It changes a bit the meaning in Finnish to German to English. Three meanings, and I thought okay, let’s try it, and then I was too lazy to change it to Hitchcock style.”
What is your method of working with actors? What do you require of them?
“What I want from actors is not to move too much, shaking their hands like windmills. And of course I choose them for their handsome faces (laughs) and the skill of acting. Actors should act, and the camera is an enemy or a friend. If you can act, it’s a friend, if you can’t, it’s an enemy.”
And how did you select the performers for this movie?
“I met Saku [Sakari Kuosmanen, Kaurismaki’s leading actor for the last 30 years. – Author] on board a steamship and there were 70 people on the ship and only him and me were standing up. We might have had a bottle with us but it’s a rumor. And as he says, I said that since you stand alcohol so well I have to write you a role, and I did. I did nine roles. And with Sherwan and Simon [Simon Al-Bazoon is another actor with an Arabic background in The Other Side of Hope. – Author] I was just lucky.”
And finally: why the topic of refugees and migrants is so important to you personally?
“Because it [attitude to them. – Ed.] is a crime against Europe. Look at the last century: we don’t have any culture of humanity, and all that there is, is some kind of democratic organization, and now it’s falling to pieces in 10 years because we’re no good. Because our culture is just one millimeter of dust. I showed us… In this sense I respect Ms. Merkel for being the only politician who seems to be at least interested in the problem. All the rest play their games. This was not a political statement.
“Sixty years ago we had 60 million refugees as we do today. And it’s only then we helped them, and now they are enemies. So where the hell is our humanity? Because if you don’t have humanity for a friend, you cannot exist as well. If we are not humans, who the hell are we then?”
