The Other Side of Hope

Snapshot

Toivon tuolla puolen is Aki Kaurismäki's twentieth-odd feature and the second panel of a "port city" trilogy begun with Le Havre (2011) and never completed. Two men arrive at zero within minutes of each other: Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a Syrian mechanic from Aleppo, climbs out of a coal bunker in Helsinki harbour, black from head to foot; Waldemar Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a travelling shirt salesman, lays his wedding ring on a table, waits for his wife to look up, and walks out. Khaled applies for asylum and is refused. Wikström liquidates his stock, wins a fortune at an underground card table, and buys a hopeless restaurant called The Golden Pint along with its three inherited staff. The lines cross behind the bins, where the two men first fight and then, without discussion, arrange a life. The film premiered in competition at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2017, where Kaurismäki won the Silver Bear for Best Director; it became Finland's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Around its release Kaurismäki announced he was finished with filmmaking — a retirement he broke six years later with Fallen Leaves.

Industry & production

The film was made through Sputnik Oy, the Helsinki company Kaurismäki has run since the 1980s (the brothers' earlier vehicle, Villealfa, having been the launch pad for both Aki and Mika Kaurismäki), with European co-production and Finnish Film Foundation support, and international sales through the German house The Match Factory. Janus Films handled the American release late in 2017. Specific budget figures are not reliably documented in English-language sources and are not worth guessing at; what is documented is the shape of the operation, which has barely changed in thirty years. Kaurismäki shoots fast, on short schedules, with a small crew drawn from the same names, in and around Helsinki, using real locations dressed backward in time. He controls the company that produces him, which is the structural fact that explains almost everything else about the film — nobody was in a position to ask for coverage, a score, or a happier ending.

This industrial autonomy matters more than usual here because of the subject. In 2015 Finland received roughly ten times its normal annual volume of asylum applications, a shift that reorganised Finnish politics inside a year. A film about a Syrian asylum seeker made in that climate, by a director with Kaurismäki's international standing, could have been financed at a scale that would have brought partners, notes, and a mandate for balance. Instead it was made cheap and quickly, at the scale of his 1990s work, and it says exactly what its director thinks. The Berlinale prize and the Oscar submission were the system recognising the film after the fact rather than shaping it in advance.

Technology

Kaurismäki is one of the last narrative directors of his generation who never crossed over. The Other Side of Hope was shot photochemically on 35mm by Timo Salminen, in a wide-ish flat ratio (roughly 1.85:1), at a moment when nearly all European art cinema of comparable budget had moved to digital capture. The choice is not nostalgia in the decorative sense; it is a colour decision. Kaurismäki's palettes depend on deep, saturated, artificially lit fields — a wall of a single green, a red door, a mustard jacket — and on blacks that stay black rather than lifting into digital noise. Film stock, hard tungsten sources, and heavy filtration hold those blocks in place.

The tension worth naming is that the film was almost certainly finished and distributed digitally: by 2017 the delivery chain was DCP, whatever the negative. So the celluloid here operates at the front end only — a production-side commitment to a particular way of registering colour and grain, delivered through the same pipes as everything else. That is the actual technological condition of late analogue holdouts, and this film is a clean example of it. Beyond capture, the film is conspicuously untouched by the tools of its decade: no digital grade pushed toward teal, no visual effects, no drone or gimbal work, no sound design layering beyond what a small crew records and mixes.

Technique

Cinematography

Salminen has shot every Kaurismäki feature since Crime and Punishment (1983), one of the longest unbroken director–cinematographer partnerships in European cinema, and his method here is the mature version of a system built over three decades. The camera is almost always locked off. Shots are held past the point where a contemporary film would cut, often a beat past the point where the actors have finished. Compositions are frontal and symmetrical, closer to a proscenium than to observational realism, and figures are placed against flat planes of colour rather than in depth. Light comes from hard, visible-feeling sources with sharp falloff — faces modelled with a single key, backgrounds dropping into black. There is no handheld work, no shallow-focus intimacy, no coverage in the conventional sense. Faces are given the same weight as objects: a coffee cup, a jukebox, and a man receiving a deportation order are all photographed with the same unhurried, unsentimental attention.

Editing

Cutting is credited to Samu Heikkilä, Kaurismäki's editor in the later phase of his career, but the editorial logic is set at the shooting stage. Because Kaurismäki shoots so little coverage, the film is effectively cut in the camera; the edit's work is timing rather than construction. The result is a film built on ellipsis. Transitions leap over exactly the material a conventional screenplay would dramatise — negotiations, decisions, the moment someone changes their mind — and land on the aftermath. Wikström buys a restaurant in what feels like three shots. Khaled is granted a bed, an identity, and a job across a handful of cuts with no scene of persuasion between them. The comedy depends on this: the deadpan is a function of the cut arriving one beat late, holding on a face after the joke, or one beat early, so that a decision registers as already made.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The world is a deliberate anachronism. Rotary phones, steel-framed spectacles, gabardine coats, tube radios, bar interiors that could be 1962 — set against unmistakable 2010s markers: a mobile phone, a television news bulletin with footage from Aleppo, an asylum interview conducted with a laptop. Kaurismäki has always dressed his films out of period, and here that stylisation does specific work: the refugee crisis is placed inside a timeless working-class Finland rather than inside a news cycle, which is both a distancing device and a claim that this situation is not new. Staging is blocked in tableaux, actors arranged laterally and moved as little as possible; a character will often enter frame, stop, deliver, and leave rather than be followed. The Golden Pint's misbegotten conversion into a sushi restaurant — the kitchen improvising with pickled herring and catastrophic quantities of wasabi for a busload of Japanese tourists — is the film's comic set piece, and it is staged with the same immobile formality as its scenes of despair. That equivalence is the method.

Sound

There is no orchestral score and no non-diegetic underscoring of emotion. Music enters as source: records, jukeboxes, and above all live performance, with Finnish rock, blues, tango and schlack players appearing on screen to play a number straight through while the narrative waits. These interludes are not filler; they are the film's substitute for the emotional swell a score would otherwise supply, and by locating that feeling in a visible performer inside the fiction, Kaurismäki keeps it from being applied to the audience from outside. Between the songs the track is exceptionally spare — footsteps, doors, dishes, weather, long silences. Dialogue is written and delivered flat, aphoristic, in short declaratives, and the mix keeps it dry and close. Khaled and his fellow asylum seekers speak Arabic and English; the Finns speak Finnish; the film neither smooths nor dramatises the friction between them.

Performance

Kaurismäki directs in the Bressonian lineage, suppressing psychological expressiveness in favour of behaviour and gesture, but he casts faces with enormous specificity. Sakari Kuosmanen — a Kaurismäki regular since the 1980s and, offscreen, a working Finnish singer — gives Wikström a monumental, granite impassivity through which almost nothing shows and everything is legible. Sherwan Haji, a Syrian-born actor settled in Finland, plays Khaled with a quiet, watchful containment that fits the house style while carrying a specificity the style alone could not produce. The restaurant staff — the lugubrious maître d', the fatalistic cook, the waitress — function as a chorus of deadpan competence. Crucially, the film breaks its own rule once: in the asylum interview, Khaled recounts what happened to his family in Aleppo in a sustained, unadorned take, and the mannered surface briefly gives way to plain testimony. That rupture is the film's ethical hinge.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The structure is two parallel lines that converge in the middle third and then partly separate again. Each protagonist is given a self-contained opening act in the same register, which quietly equates a Finnish man's midlife exit from a marriage with a refugee's flight from a destroyed city — not as moral equivalence, but as a shared condition of starting over with nothing. The film's dramatic mode is fable: characters act on impulse and instinct, help is offered without deliberation, and the mechanics of plausibility are waved away. Wikström's poker win is not foreshadowed or earned; it is granted, the way a folk tale grants a purse of gold.

Against this fabular generosity Kaurismäki sets a bureaucracy rendered with cold procedural accuracy — the reception centre, the interview, the ruling that Aleppo is safe enough to return to, the deportation order. The comedy and the administrative violence occupy the same flat, undramatic surface, and neither is allowed to modulate for the other. The ending refuses resolution in both directions: Khaled's sister Miriam is found and chooses to enter the asylum system legally, walking into the process that has just crushed her brother, while Khaled — stabbed by a member of a nationalist street gang that calls itself the Finland Liberation Army — is left by the water, alive, with a dog, under a tree, in a shot that declines to say whether he survives the day. The Finnish title points at this: not hope, but hope's far side.

Genre & cycle

Formally the film is a deadpan comedy grafted onto proletarian melodrama, Kaurismäki's lifelong hybrid. Contextually it belongs to the mid-2010s European refugee cycle, a body of films that includes Jacques Audiard's Dheepan (2015), Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea (2016), Jonas Carpignano's Mediterranea (2015), and, on the documentary side, Ai Weiwei's Human Flow (2017). Within that cycle Kaurismäki is the outlier. Where the dominant idiom was handheld immersive realism or observational documentary, he answered with tableau, artifice, and jokes — a decision that some viewers read as the only honest option available to a Finnish auteur who could not claim first-hand access to the experience, and others read as an aestheticisation of suffering. The film also sits alongside Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake (2016) as a study of administrative cruelty, though Loach's naturalism and Kaurismäki's stylisation are almost opposite solutions to the same problem. Internally, it extends the "port city" cycle from Le Havre, whose plot — an old working man shelters an undocumented African boy from the authorities — it deliberately rhymes with and then darkens.

Authorship & method

Kaurismäki writes, directs, and produces; the film is authored to an unusual degree by one person working with a fixed repertory company. Timo Salminen's camera and lighting are inseparable from the style — it is genuinely difficult to say where the director's visual signature ends and the cinematographer's begins, which is what thirty-five years of collaboration produces. Samu Heikkilä cuts. There is no composer, and the absence is systematic rather than economic: Kaurismäki's musical authorship is curatorial, assembling records and booking musicians to appear in the frame. Production design and costume are handled by a small team largely continuous with his earlier films; below-the-line credits for this production are thinly documented in English-language sources, and it would be irresponsible to be more specific than that.

The method is famously compressed — short shoots, few takes, dialogue written sparely and delivered as written, no rehearsal toward naturalism. Kaurismäki's stated forebears are consistent across decades of interviews: Ozu for the static frame and the ellipsis, Bresson for the flattened performance, Chaplin and Vigo for the sentiment held at arm's length, Hollywood melodrama and French poetic realism for the moral universe. The style is not an ironic quotation of those sources; it is a working method derived from them.

Movement / national cinema

Aki and Mika Kaurismäki are the filmmakers who made Finnish cinema legible to the international art-house circuit in the 1980s, and Aki's run — the proletarian trilogy of Shadows in Paradise (1986), Ariel (1988) and The Match Factory Girl (1990), then Drifting Clouds (1996), The Man Without a Past (2002, Grand Prix at Cannes) and Lights in the Dusk (2006) — effectively constitutes a national cinema of one. His Finland is a fiction: a country of harbour bars, closing factories, tango, cigarettes and unpayable debts, drawn from postwar reality and maintained long after that reality dissolved. The Other Side of Hope imports the 2015 present into that constructed nation and lets the two grind against each other.

The Kaurismäki brothers, with the critic and historian Peter von Bagh, founded the Midnight Sun Film Festival at Sodankylä in 1986, an institution that did as much as the films to connect Finnish film culture to the wider cinephile world. The nod is characteristic: the restaurant's dog is named Koistinen, after the protagonist of Lights in the Dusk, one of many private continuities that make the late films read as a single ongoing work.

Era / period

The film is precisely dated by its politics even as its décor refuses dating. It arrives after the 2015 asylum surge, after the nationalist Finns Party entered a Finnish governing coalition, and after the appearance of far-right street patrol groups in northern Finland — the immediate real-world referent for the skinhead gang that stalks Khaled. It also arrives in the long shadow of post-2008 austerity, which is why the Finnish half of the story is about liquidation, gambling, and a failing small business rather than about prosperity offering charity. Europe in 2017 was arguing about whether hospitality was affordable; Kaurismäki's answer is that the question is not economic. Made at the age of sixty, announced as a farewell, the film also reads as a late work summarising a career: every motif from thirty years is present, deployed with a directness that no longer bothers to disguise itself as anything but a moral position.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception was broadly warm and, in the art-house press, frequently admiring; the Silver Bear for Best Director confirmed it at the festival level, and Finland's selection of the film for Academy consideration confirmed it nationally. The recurring critical reservations are worth recording accurately: that the film is schematic where Le Havre was buoyant; that the fable structure lets solidarity arrive too easily, dissolving a political problem into a personal kindness; and that a Finnish director's stylised deadpan may be an inadequate or presumptuous instrument for depicting Syrian displacement. The counter-argument, made just as often, is that the artifice is precisely what protects the film from the pieties of humanitarian realism, and that the one unstylised scene — Khaled's testimony — is placed exactly where it does the most work. Sherwan Haji's performance drew consistent praise. I have avoided citing aggregate scores or box-office figures here because I cannot verify them.

Backward, the influences are legible and largely acknowledged: Ozu and Bresson in the grammar; Chaplin in the structure of the immigrant fable (the film appeared a century after The Immigrant, a resonance worth noting without claiming intent); Italian neorealism in the dignity assigned to work and to objects; Sirk, Borzage and French poetic realism in the melodramatic underpinning; and, most directly, Kaurismäki's own Le Havre, of which this is the darker, less consoling rewrite.

Forward, the film's influence is inseparable from its author's, which has been diffuse rather than school-forming. Kaurismäki's deadpan-tableau idiom, developed in parallel with Jim Jarmusch's (a friend and collaborator — Jarmusch appears in Leningrad Cowboys Go America) and with Roy Andersson's more caustic Swedish version, became one of the standing options in European art cinema, visible in the work of younger Nordic filmmakers including Juho Kuosmanen, whose The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki (2016) shares the commitment to film stock and to an unhurried, unglamorised past. Within the refugee cycle, The Other Side of Hope remains the standing counter-model: the demonstration that the subject can be treated in comedy, in stylisation, and in fable without condescension — a template later visible in more modest form in films that pair displacement with small-scale local hospitality, including Loach's The Old Oak (2023).

Its most concrete legacy, though, is internal. The retirement it announced did not hold; Kaurismäki returned in 2023 with Fallen Leaves, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, restored the romance the earlier film withheld, and let the war on the radio — Ukraine, now — do what the television news did here. Seen from that side, The Other Side of Hope is the hinge of the late period: the film in which Kaurismäki's constructed Finland finally admitted the actual world, and did not pretend it could be fixed.