Thursday, December 14 | 8 pm
The first entry—followed by 2017’s The Other Side of Hope—in a planned series of films about the European refugee crisis, Le Havre follows Marcel Marx (André Wilms, reprising his role from Kaurismäki’s La Vie de Bohème), an aging shoeshiner who lives and works in the titular port city. Reeling from the news that his beloved wife Arletty (Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen) might be seriously ill, Marcel befriends a young African refugee seeking passage to London. Conspiring with helpful friends and neighbors, he hides the boy in his apartment and takes steps to reunite him with his family. Combining Kaurismäki’s signature mixture of deadpan, noir-tinged fatalism and precise, economical storytelling with the warm collective spirit of Jean Renoir’s 1930s Popular-Front films, Le Havre is a quiet triumph of artistic and moral integrity.
Director Aki Kaurismäki | 2011 | In French with English subtitles | 93 minutes | NR | DCP
