An acclaimed filmmaker whose works helped to define Finnish New Wave Cinema, Aki Kaurismäki is one of Finland’s national film treasures. After working a variety of odd jobs (postman, dishwasher, film critic), he got his start in cinema in the early 1980s, collaborating on films with his older brother Mika. Over the years, Aki Kaurismäki has played a wide variety of roles in the world of film: director, screenwriter, editor, actor, theatre manager, film festival founder and inveterate promoter of Finnish cinema and film culture. With minimalist style and oblique humour, Aki Kaurismäki’s films reveal the warmth and humanity that exists behind the cold, indifferent face of contemporary society.

From December 29, 2010 - January 16, 2011, UCCA will present eight of the director’s finest films in Aki Kaurismäki: A Retrospective. This marks the first time these films have been screened in mainland China on the original 35mm film print. Four of the films are taken from Kaurismäki’s “Proletariat Triology” and “Loser Trilogy,” explorations of society’s forgotten strata of the poor, unemployed, homeless or hapless: Ariel (1988), Drifting Clouds (1996), The Man Without a Past (2002) and Lights in the Dusk (2006). Crime and Punishment (1983) and Bohemian Life (1992) are cinematic adaptations of classic works of literature, while Juha (1998) has been described as “the last silent film of the 20th century.” Rounding out the series is Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), a raucous black comedy/road film/mockumentary about a kitschy Soviet rock band touring the U.S. and Mexico with their dead bass player kept on ice in the trunk of their oversized Cadillac.

Selected films

Lights in the Dusk

Official selection, Cannes Film Festival (2006)

Best Film, Jussi Awards (2007)

The Man Without a Past

Best Film, Jussi Awards (2002)

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Awards (2002)

Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival (2002)

FIPRESCI Film of the Year Award, San Sebastián International Film Festival (2002)

Juha

C.I.C.A.E. Award – Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival (1999)

Nominated for Best Nordic Feature Film, Norway Amanda Awards (1999)

Drifting Clouds

Best Film, Jussi Awards (1997)

Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention, Cannes Film Festival (1996)

Bohemian Life

FIPRESCI Prize-Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival (1992)

Nominated for Best Film, European Film Awards (1992)

Leningrad Cowboys Go America

With a cameo appearance by director Jim Jarmusch.

Ariel

FIPRESCI Prize, Moscow International Film Festival (1989)

Best Foreign Language Film National Society of Film Critics Awards, US (1991)

Crime and Punishment

Best Debut Film, Jussi Awards (1983)

Wednesday, Dec 29th Thursday, Dec 30th
19:00 Drifting Clouds 19:00 Crime and Punishment

Tuesday, Jan 4th Wednesday, Jan 5th
19:00 Bohemian Life 19:00 Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Thursday, Jan 6th Friday, Jan 7th
19:00 Drifting Clouds 17:00 Lights in the Dusk

Saturday, Jan 8th Sunday, Jan 9th
19:00 The Man Without a Past 19:00 Juha

Tuesday, Jan 11th Wednesday, Jan 12th
19:00 Ariel 17:00 The Man Without a Past
19:00 Lights in the Dusk

Thursday, Jan 13th Friday, Jan 14th
17:00 Crime and Punishment 17:00 Bohemian Life
19:00 Juha 19:00 Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Sunday, Jan 16th
19:00 Ariel

Lights in the Dusk

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 2006, 78 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Friday, Jan 7th, 17:00

Wednesday,Jan 12th, 19:00

Nominated for Golden Palm Award, Cannes Film Festival (2006)

Best Film, Jussi Awards (2007)

Koistenin is a sad sack, a man without affect or friends. He's a night-watchman in Helsinki with ideas of starting his own business, but nothing to go with those intentions. He sometimes talks a bit with a woman who runs a snack trailer near his work. Out of the blue, a sophisticated young blonde woman attaches herself to Koistenin. He thinks of her as his girlfriend, and begins taking her on her rounds. Little does he know she's in league with a crook who is planning a jewel robbery, and Koistenin is their patsy. Will he ever wise up?

The Man Without a Past

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 2002, 97 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Saturday, Jan 8th, 19:00

Wednesday, Jan 12th, 17:00

Best Film, Jussi Awards (2002)

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Awards (2002)

Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival (2002)

FIPRESCI Film of the Year Award, San Sebastián International Film Festival (2002)

The Man Without a Past delivers a new edge to the story that stirred viewers all around the world in Drifting Clouds. The film follows a man who arrives in Helsinki and gets beaten up so severely he develops amnesia. Unable to remember his name or anything from his past life, he cannot get a job or an apartment, so he starts living on the outskirts of the city and slowly starts putting his life back on track.

A nameless man comes to town and gets beaten to death in the first possible moment. Here starts this epic drama, film, or should we say a dream of lonely hearts with empty pockets under the big sky of our Lord…or should we say birds.

My last film was black and white and silent, which clearly shows that I am a man of business. However, going forward on that road would demand skipping out the picture next. What would we have then, but a shadow. So, always ready for compromises, I decided to turn around and make this film here, which has loads of dialogue plus a variety of colours, not to mention other commercial values.

I have to admit that deep in my subconscious there might have been a hope that this step would make me seem normal, too. My social, economical and political views of the state of society, morality and love can hopefully be found in the film itself.

Juha

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1998, 85 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Sunday, Jan 9th, 19:00

Thursday, Jan 13th, 19:00

C.I.C.A.E. Award – Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival (1999)

Nominated for Best Nordic Feature Film, Norway Amanda Awards (1999)

Marja is a simple peasant woman married to her older husband Juha. They lead a very simple country life, spending most of their days farming and tending to their livestock. Marja's world is turned upside down when Shemeikka comes to the happily married couple asking them for help with his broken down sports convertible and a place to spend the night. As Juha works to repair the car, Shemeikka attempts to lure Marja to leave Juha and come to the city with him. Shemeikka and Marja leave for the city but Marja's dream quickly becomes a nightmare when Shemeikka enslaves her in a brothel.

Director’s Statement

In hindsight, I am not surprised that almost all efforts (except Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle) to make a silent film during the last decades have somehow failed; the easiness of explaining all by words has polluted our storytelling to a pale shadow of original cinema.
We can never again make films like Broken Blossoms, Sunrise or Queen Kelly, because since film started to gamble with mumbling and all that “hoochie-coochie” and fancy words, stories have lost their purity, and cinema its essence: innocence.

Drifting Clouds

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1996, 96 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Wednesday,Dec 29th ,19:00

Thursday, Jan 6th, 19:00

Best Film, Jussi Awards (1997)

Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention, Cannes Film Festival (1996)

Ilona loses her job at the restaurant “Dubrovnik”, the best restaurant in town. Lauri, her husband, draws the lowest card when four out of eight tramway-drivers have to be fired. They see no reason to worry: after all, they are both well under fifty. A few months later Melartin, the former porter of the Dubrovnik, proposes to Ilona that they should open their own restaurant. Since they cannot prove to the bank that they do not really need a loan, their request is turned down. Ilona empties her savings account and Lauri takes the money to the casino to “multiply” it.

Director’s Statement

The actual subject of the film is unemployment, outlined more on the menial and less on the economic side of it. The unemployment situation in Finland and almost everywhere in the world is so dire, and its mental effects so desperate, that I believe film can at the moment have no other purpose than to give hope, on one hand, and to document, on the other.
The style is stylized realism complemented with Frank Capra—like the hyper-optimism in the final stages of It’s a Wonderful Life. This means realism in relation to the content, and stylization in relation to the scenery and sets…in other words, I am aiming at some kind of a Neo-Realism mixed with lots of comical elements. I hope the eventual viewer, whoever he or she is, will come out of this film happier than he or she was when coming in.
When I started writing the script for this film, I placed the task of Frank Capra’s story of emotional rescue It’s a Wonderful Life in one extreme corner, and Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves in the other, and the Finnish reality in between.

Bohemian Life

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1992, 100 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Tuesday, Jan 4th, 19:00

Friday, Jan 14th, 17:00

FIPRESCI Prize-Forum of New Cinema, Berlin International Film Festival (1992)

Nominated for Best Film, European Film Awards (1992)

In this modern adaptation of La Vie de Bohème, three penniless artists become friends in present-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa; Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher; and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise. Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi, a barmaid. The day he asks her to move in with him, he is deported. Six months later, he sneaks back to Paris, and Mimi leaves her new boyfriend to be with him. Conflicts arise, especially around their poverty, and soon Mimi and Rodolfo separate, as do Marcel and his Musette. The three men scrape together a meal to celebrate All Saints' Day, and Mimi arrives, ill. Can her friends bring her back to health?

Director’s Statement

I became acquainted with Murger’s novel in 1976 while employed as the lowermost functionary of the local postal service in the government district of N. As I was lolling around aimlessly one evening, one of the companions with whom I shared an apartment pushed the book through the crack of the door. This moment may be considered the close of the bourgeois period of my life, which was not resumed until four hours later. But by then I had finished the book, and had decided immediately that I was going to base a film on it. With this in mind, I even resigned from my poorly-paid position, without taking into account that there were a few practical obstacles in my way.

I hope that Murger’s name will be on everyone’s lips; Mimi will live again; and no one will remember Puccini, the man who, as Murger himself wrote of the exploiters of Villon, “looted the field of the poor and from the treasure acquired there minted the commemorative coins of his own reputation.”

Leningrad Cowboys Go America

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1989, 79 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Wednesday, Jan 5th, 19:00

Friday, Jan 14th, 19:00

Somewhere in the tundra, in no-man’s land, lives the worst rock ’n’ roll band in the world, an outfit with no audience and absolutely no commercial potential. And so they decide to bury their national sentiments and go to the United States where people swallow any kind of shit.
This film is the story of their journey over the ocean and through the continent, a story of seamy bars and honest folk in the backyards of the Hamburger Nation. Ugly actors, good feelings. Yeah.
This parody of Jim Jarmusch (and paean to sullen drunkenness) is the only example in town and the film’s single joke – a band of grotesque European rock musicians discover the New World – happens to be a good one.

Ariel

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1988, 95 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Tuesday, Jan 11th, 19:00

Sunday, Jan 16th, 19:00

FIPRESCI Prize, Moscow International Film Festival (1989)

Best Foreign Language Film, National Society of Film Critics Awards, US (1991)

The movie tells the story of Taisto Kasurinen, a Finnish coal miner whose father has just committed suicide and who is framed for a crime he did not commit. In jail, he starts to dream about leaving the country and starting a new life. He escapes from prison but things don't go as planned...

Ariel begins as a story of unemployment, gains some romantic tones before turning into a prison story and finally, it ends as a crime film. Ariel tells the truth about the western market society. Stylistically, the film swings between poetic realism and black comedy.

Crime and Punishment

Finland, Aki Kaurismäki, 1983, 94 min, Chinese and English subtitles

Thursday, Dec 30th, 19:00

Thursday, Jan 13th, 17:00

Best Debut Film, Jussi Awards (1983)

Crime and Punishment is a modern adaptation of the classic crime novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky that is faithful in its spirit to the original. Protagonist Rahikainen, a young slaughterhouse worker, commits a senseless crime. Through his act, he finally drifts out of society and into loneliness. Only a young girl who accidentally arrives at the scene of the crime wants to follow him. Guilt and the tightening net of the police throw a shadow over their desperate love affair.
The nocturnal concrete jungle serves as the backdrop to the struggle for intellectual supremacy between the police and the murderer. Rahikainen’s only weapon in this struggle is his total indifference to everything.

Director’s Statement

Crime and Punishment is first and foremost a film about the final desperate rebellion of a young man against society—the society that, as we know, is a merciless machine. Perhaps we are all guilty…but guilty of what? This insufferable question faces us everywhere, hands on hips, sneering at us.

Director’s bio

Aki Kaurismäki was born in Orimattlia, Finland in 1957. He worked as a film critic before joining his older brother Mika as a co-scenarist and assistant director in 1980. The result of this early period was The Liar (1981), a short film directed by Mika that was co-written by, and even starred, Aki. In the same year, the two brothers worked together on their first feature, a rock documentary called The Saimaa Gesture (1981). What followed was Aki’s own first film, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1983).

Ariel (1988) brought the Finnish director his first international success by winning the FIPRESCI prize at the Moscow Film Festival. This, along with further acclaim garnered by The Match Factory Girl (1990) at Berlin, heralded the arrival of Aki Kaurismäki as a major force in the landscape of European cinema. Subsequent exposure in the international film circuit culminated in his Grand Prize win at Cannes for The Man Without a Past (2002), Aki’s most widely distributed film thus far.

Some of the director’s favourite collaborators include Timo Salminen, the cinematographer for nearly all of his productions since 1981; the late Matti Pellonpää, who acted alongside Aki in The Liar and became his most frequent leading man; and Kati Outinen, the award-winning actress who has starred in nine of his works.