Kaurismaki gets ready for Cannes
by Annika Pham
Lights in the Dusk, the highly anticipated last part of Aki Kaurismäki’s trilogy, has been out on Finnish screens since February 3, but the director’s own production company, Sputnik Film, told Cineuropa that they will wait for Cannes to launch it internationally.
Exactly ten years have passed since the first part of the trilogy, Drifting Clouds, was presented in competition at Cannes, and four years since The Man Without a Past [+see also:
trailer
film profile] won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize.
While the trilogy’s first film was about unemployment and the second about homelessness, the new film will focus on loneliness. "Like Chaplin’s little tramp, the protagonist, a man named Koistinen (Janne Hyytiäinen), searches the hard world for a small crack through which he could crawl in, but both his fellow beings and the faceless apparatus of society crush his modest hopes, one after another", explains the director. "Criminal elements exploit his longing for love and his position as a night watchman in a robbery they pull off, leaving Koistinen to face the consequences. This is done with the help of the most callous woman in the history of cinema since Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Eve. As a result, Koistinen loses his job, his freedom and his dreams". However, with his usual touch of humour, Kaurismäki adds: "Luckily for our protagonist, the writer of the film has a reputation of being a soft-hearted old man. So we can assume there is a spark of hope illuminating the final scene".
Like The Man Without a Past the film was produced by Sputnik Film in co-production with Germany (Pandora) and France (Pyramide), and with support from the Finnish Film Foundation. The €1.3m film released domestically through Sandrew Metronome Distribution on 12 screens has so far attracted 16,348 cinemagoers.
Sales company The Match Factory has pre-sold the film to Italy (Bim Distribuzione) and the other Scandinavian territories: Sweden (Folkets Bio ), Norway (Arthouse) and Denmark (Huset’s Biograf), where it will open in the autumn.
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