Released in theaters in March 2017, the editorial team returns to the DVD release of The Other Side of Hope! The film, presented in the official selection at the Berlinale 2017, won the Silver Bear for Best Director.
In Helsinki, Wikhström decides to change his life by leaving his alcoholic wife and his job to open a restaurant. Khaled, a young Syrian refugee, ends up in the capital by accident and has his asylum application rejected. It is then that the chance meeting between Wikhström and Khaled takes place.
A sober film about hospitality
"With this film, I try my best to break the European point of view on refugees considered sometimes as victims objects of our self-pity, sometimes as economic refugees who insolently want to take our jobs, our women, our homes and our cars."
Without grandiloquence and without artifice, Kaurismäki delivers a film of great sobriety. The sets are refined, the dialogues reduced to the strict minimum, the editing is simple, as if to recall the most total stripping in which these migrants evolve carried by the hope of finding a better future.
Squeaky humor
The other side of hope is akin to a timeless comedy where the absurd never ceases to intervene. Typewriters rub shoulders with digital cameras, marks (former Finnish currency) rub shoulders with euros, local culture rubs shoulders with globalization… The restaurant bought by Wikhström becomes the banner of this paradoxical society in constant evolution, this society that evolves at two speeds: between new technologies and dusty prejudices.
In the DVD edition, this beautiful film is accompanied by an interview with Aki Kaurismäki, by Laure Adler (show "l'heure bleue" of March 16, 2017 on France Inter) as well as 4 videos of unpublished songs! A real treat!
