Six years after the sublime, award-winning ‘Le Havre’, Aki Kaurismäki returns with the second film in a planned trilogy focusing on port cities. Kaurismäki regular Sakari Kuosmanen stars as Wikstrom, a poker-playing restaurateur and former travelling salesman who crosses paths with a Syrian refugee who has just arrived in Finland. Shot on 35mm in Helsinki by Timo Salminen, ‘The Other Side of Hope’ promises topicality and plaintive emotions as Kaurismäki tackles the most pressing of global issues: the plight of the refugee.

The Other Side of Hope, Aki Kaurismäki’s gorgeous, cuttingly poignant, and soon, surely, to be prize-winning new comedy, begins with a young Syrian asylum seeker emerging from a coal pile in Helsinki’s industrial port.

THE TELEGRAPH