Director: Aki Kaurismaki
Runtime: 101 minutes
Country of origin: Finland/Germany

Winner of the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, the new film from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre) intertwines the stories of two itinerant protagonists: Khaled (Sherwan Haji), a young Syrian refugee who drifts into Helsinki harbour as a stowaway; and Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen), a travelling salesman turned restaurateur, who finds Khaled sleeping outside his diner and hires him as a cleaner and dishwasher. “The issue of migrants and refugees [may] still be something from which cinema mostly averts its gaze, [but] not Kaurismäki’s cinema…. His humane comedy [has] absorbed this idea, [and] in fact embraced it with almost miraculous ease and simplicity” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).

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