Finland’s official submission for 2012 Academy Awards – Best Foreign Language Film, ‘Le Havre’ by director Aki Kaurismäki will be released in NYC and LA on Friday, October 21 with an expected national release to follow.
The film premiered at 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it was awarded the FIPRESCI Critic’s prize, and was screened at the recent Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals.
In his wry and warm-hearted portrait of the French harbor city that gives the film its name, legendary Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past, The Match Factory Girl) pays tribute to the Gallic cinema he loves with a film that exists somewhere between the reality of contemporary France and the classic cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville and Michel Carné.
LE HAVRE, Kaurismäki’s 16th feature concerns a young African refugee (newcomer Blondin Miguel) who is thrown by fate into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms), a well-read bohemian who works as a shoe-shiner. With innate optimism and the unwavering solidarity of his community, Marcel stands up to officials doggedly pursuing the boy for deportation. Kati Outinen, Kaurismäki’s muse who appears in most of his films, plays Marcel’s wife Arletty.
2011 35 mm In French with English Subtitles Not Rated 93 min Sound: Dolby SRD Aspect Ratio: 1.85