This wry, melancholic comedy from Aki Kaurismki, a clear-eyed response to the current refugee crisis, follows two people searching for a place to call home. Displaced Syrian Khaled (Sherwan Haji) lands in Helsinki as a stowaway; meanwhile, middle-aged salesman Wikstrm (Sakari Kuosmanen) leaves behind his wife and job and buys a conspicuously unprofitable seafood restaurant. After Khaled is denied asylum, he decides not to return to Aleppoand the paths of the two men cross fortuitously. As deadpan as the best of the directors work, and with a deep well of empathy for its down-but-not-out characters (many of them played by members of Kaurismki's ever-reliable stock company), The Other Side of Hope is a bittersweet celebration of human kindness in an unwelcoming world.

свернуть