The Finnish Director Making the Most-Interesting Movies About Immigration

A small man, a refugee, his face and clothes blackened by coal, emerges from the darkness of a ship’s hold at the beginning of Aki Kaurismäki’s new film, The Other Side of Hope, and although the coal dust gets showered off a little later, the grit of politics won’t wash away. The stowaway, a young Syrian named Khaled Ali (Sherwan Haji), is not political himself—he neither knows nor especially cares who launched the missile that wiped out most of his family in Aleppo. “Government troops, rebels, U.S.A., Russia, Hezbollah, or isis,” he says, naming the suspects with a weary shake of his head.

But as he discovers when he applies for asylum in Finland, he is no longer merely himself, an unassuming mechanic far from home and searching for the sister who was separated from him at one of the many borders he’s crossed. He is now a problem, something that requires the machinery of bureaucracy to creak into motion. There are photos to be taken, questions to be asked, forms to be completed, dormitories to be filled with those who, like Khaled, have the misfortune to come from dangerous places. Even before he presents himself at the police station on his first morning in Helsinki, Khaled politics, now.