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Welcome to Kino Laika: Aki Kaurismäki and Mika Lätti’s cinema in Karkkila, an hour away from Helsinki. A place where love for movies – and dogs – meets ghosts of cinema’s past.

“One time, I had a 35mm copy of the Lumière brothers’ film ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.’ I lent it to some cinema and it never came back. And now, I have forgotten which cinema it was,” recalls Kaurismäki, who, like Lätti, has been a resident of Karkkila, a modest town of 9,000, for decades now.

“I have lived here for 38 years and I like it a lot, but we never had a cinema here before. To see movies, local people had to travel to the next town or even Helsinki. Not anymore. It’s wonderful to offer them this chance,” he adds.

“Karkkila has been a good place for us both and we wanted to give something back to this town.

Beginning in 1986, the Berlin International Film Festival has presented the Berlinale Camera to film personalities or institutions to which it feels particularly indebted and wishes to express its thanks. This year, during the 64th edition of the festival, producer and distributor Karl “Baumi” Baumgartner will be awarded the prestigious Berlinale Camera.

Karl Baumgartner is one of Germany’s leading producers and independent distributors. In his capacity as producer, he has brought world cinema to German audiences expanding their horizons in terms of what cinema from abroad can provide.

In 1982, together with Reinhard Brundig, he launched Pandora Film Distribution and it developed into one of the most important companies in the field of art house cinema. Pandora Film discovered filmmakers such as Andrej Tarkovsky, Jim Jarmusch, Sally Potter, Kim Ki Duk, and Aki Kaurismäki, as well as many others. With Jane Campion’s The Piano in 1993, Karl Baumgartner celebrated his first great success as distributor. It was followed by Emir Kusturica’s Palme d’Or winning Underground (1995), executively produced by Pandora Film.

As a producer, Karl Baumgartner has participated several times in the Berlin International Film Festival – in the Competition with the films Super 8 Stories by Emir Kusturica (out of competition, 2001), My Sweet Home by Filippos Tsitos (2001), Sam Garbarski’s Irina Palm (2007), and Jasmila Žbanić’s Na putu (On the Path, 2010). His most recent contribution to the Berlinale Competition was as co-producer of Kebun binatang (Postcards from the Zoo, 2012) by Edwin and Layla Fourie (2013) by Pia Marais.

The Berlinale Camera will be awarded to Karl Baumgartner at 4.00 pm on February 8, 2014 at the CinemaxX 9. It will be followed by the film Boheemielämää (La vie de bohème, 1992) by Aki Kaurismäki who, together with Festival Director Dieter Kosslick, will give a speech in Karl Baumgartner’s honor.

The Berlinale Camera has been awarded since 1986. Until 2003, it was donated by Berlin-based jeweller David Goldberg. From 2004 through 2013, Georg Hornemann Objects, a Dusseldorf-based atelier, sponsored the trophy, which goldsmith Hornemann redesigned for the Berlinale in 2008: Modelled on a real camera, the Berlinale Camera now has 128 finely crafted components. Many of these silver and titanium parts, such as the swivel head and tripod, are movable.

In more Berlinale news, two new episodes of House of Cards to be shown on festival closing day.

The award will be presented to Baumgartner after laudatory speeches by Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick and Aki Kaurismäki on Feb 8 before a screening of Kaurismäki’s 1991 film La Vie de Bohème.

In 1982, Baumgartner and Reinhard Brundig founded the distrubution company Pandora Filmverleih in Frankfurt, which became one of the leading players in the world of interational arthouse cinema, discovering such talents as Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurimäki, Sally Potter, Andrei Tarkovsky and Kim Ki Duk.

Pandora’s move into production has seen the company backing films by Emir Kusturica (Underground), Sam Garbarski (Irina Palm), Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre), Sergey Dvorstevoy (Tulpan), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), Claire Denis (Bastards), and, most recently, Fatih Akin (The Cut), to mention just a handful.

Apart from Cologne-based Pandora Filmproduktion, Baumgartner is also a partner with Thanassis Karathanos in Pallas Film, which...

In more Berlinale news, two new episodes of House of Cards to be shown on festival closing day.

The award will be presented to Baumgartner after laudatory speeches by Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick and Aki Kaurismäki on Feb 8 before a screening of Kaurismäki’s 1991 film La Vie de Bohème.

In 1982, Baumgartner and Reinhard Brundig founded the distrubution company Pandora Filmverleih in Frankfurt, which became one of the leading players in the world of interational arthouse cinema, discovering such talents as Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurimäki, Sally Potter, Andrei Tarkovsky and Kim Ki Duk.

Pandora’s move into production has seen the company backing films by Emir Kusturica (Underground), Sam Garbarski (Irina Palm), Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre), Sergey Dvorstevoy (Tulpan), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), Claire Denis (Bastards), and, most recently, Fatih Akin (The Cut), to mention just a handful.

Apart from Cologne-based Pandora Filmproduktion, Baumgartner is also a partner with Thanassis Karathanos in Pallas Film, which...

Moviefone's Top DVD of the Week

"Blue Jasmine"

What's It About? Cate Blanchett stars as Jasmine, a fancy New Yorker whose late husband was one of those finance scumbags who swindled people. Left high and dry, she heads to Sf to impose upon her sweet sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), who's got her own problems to deal with.

Why We're In: This Woody Allen flick is getting rave reviews, nominations, and awards out the wazoo, so if you haven't seen it yet, get cracking.

Moviefone's Top Blu-ray of the Week

"It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (Criterion)

What's It About? Comedy bigwigs like Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, and Jonathan Winters star in this slapstick-y flick about buried treasure.

Why We're In: Because it's winter and you need a laugh, and because this Criterion edition is restored, extended, and spiffed up in all the right ways.

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 21, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

A group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris in La vie de bohème.

The 1992 film La vie de bohème by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, Leningrad Cowboys Go America) is a deadpan tragic-comedy about a group of impoverished, outcast artists living the bohemian life in Paris.

Based on stories from Henri Murger’s influential mid nineteenth-century book Scènes de la vie de bohème (the basis for the opera La bohème), the film features a marvelous trio of Kaurismäki regulars, André Wilms, Matti Pellonpää, and Karl Väänänen, as a poet, painter, and composer who scrape by together, sharing in life’s daily absurdities.

Gorgeously shot in black and white, La vie de bohème is a vibrantly scrappy rendition of a beloved tale and one of Kaurismäki’s most beguiling works.

Presented in French with English subtitles,...

Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is a charming and engrossing fable – a sort of Fractured Fairy Tale for adults – that interprets one of today’s most contentious political issues through the director’s distinctly eccentric prism. A strong Palme d’Or contender at Cannes in 2011, Le Havre relocates classic Kaurismäki production elements from Finland to a harbor town in northern France. And, not surprisingly, the veteran director finds this sleepy Britannic burg as rife with idiosyncrasy as any snowbound suburb of Helsinki. Under thick gray clouds, Kaurismäki’s diorama of quirky characters gradually meander their way to moments of epiphany and catharsis, while viewers marvel at the director’s mystical moments of compassionate humanity and playful cinematic homage.

The film takes us through a couple of weeks in the life of Marcel Marx (Andrè Wilms), an unremarkable 60-ish shoe shiner who eeks out a living at the town’s bustling train station.

Chicago – It takes a French village in the sweet, optimistic, good-natured “Le Havre,” a film about a kind man who does something to help another and how the community doesn’t just rally around him but the world produces a miracle for him in the end. It is such a kind-hearted film that suggests without cynicism that doing good not only will bring more good but will essentially be supported by the world around you. Incredibly well-made and memorable, “Le Havre” is a stellar modern addition to The Criterion Collection.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Aki Kaurismaki takes his unique eye to the title city in the North of France for this tale of an immigrant boy who is first protected by a kind gentleman and then essentially guarded by the entire community. Sweet, surprising, smart, and very subtle, “Le Havre” is a gentle film that builds its story through character, setting, and humanity...

Le Havre from internationally acclaimed director Aki Kaurismäki comes to DVD and Blu Ray on 6 August, and to mark the release we’ve got 3 Blu-rays to give away!

Le Havre sees Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past) tackle the subject of Northern Europe’s attitude to refugees from the developing world. His approach is dramatic, funny, heart-warming and, like his other work, beautifully offbeat. Featuring superb performances from its cast that includes André Wilms (La Vie de Bohème), Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Red Lights) and the young Blondin Miguel.

Marcel Marx (Wilms), a former author and a well-known Bohemian, has retreated into a voluntary exile in the port city of Le Havre, where he feels he has reached a closer rapport with the people serving them in the occupation of the honourable, but not too profitable, of a shoe-shiner. He has buried his dreams of a literary breakthrough and...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 31, 2012

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

André Wilms means business in Le Havre.

Le Havre (2011) is a surprisingly warm-hearted comedy film from the usually deadpan Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (Leningrad Cowboys Go America).

In the French harbor city Le Havre, fate throws the young African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) into the path of Marcel Marx (André Wilms, La vie de bohème), a kindly, aging bohemian who shines shoes for a living. With inborn optimism and the support of most of his tight-knit community, Marcel stands up to the officials doggedly pursuing the African boy for deportation.

Tagged by Criterion as “a political fairy tale that exists somewhere between the reality of contemporary France and the classic French cinema of the past, especially the poetic realist works of Jean Duvivier and Marcel Carné,” the acclaimed Le Havre rang up some $620,000 at the U.S. box office since...

The director and writer has learned from the greats – and with his latest, Le Havre, he proves that he's earned his place among them, says John Patterson

With Aki Kaurismäki's movies, as with Yasujirô Ozu's, familiarity breeds contentment. Taken cumulatively, they extol and embody the pleasures of repetition – the comforts of familiarity – without ever seeming repetitious or familiar themselves, even though Kaurismäki basically tells the same stories over and over again.

Returning to the Finn's work after 20 years of not seeing it (he was poorly distributed here in the Us for much of that time), my first impression was of an old, reliable and rewarding vibe-cum-sensibility still chugging along productively, the work perhaps wiser and kinder now, always evolving in tiny ways here and there, but always offering the same combination of deadpan fatalism (1988's Ariel has the funniest suicide in the history of cinema) amid a rigorously...

Updated through 5/20.

"Since the early 1980s, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki has been mining his own peculiar seam and achieving a quiet miracle — making films that gladden the heart the most when they're at their most unflappably lugubrious." Jonathan Romney for Screen: "Le Havre essentially offers us the director's usual menu — poker-faced acting, weather-beaten faces, political compassion, hyper-stylized staging and decrepit barroom interiors lit con amore. But there's something fresh in this new film, which sees the Finn fully venting his Francophilia for the first time since 1991's La Vie de Bohème."

"Le Havre is shot in the French port town, with French actors and dialogue, though Kaurismäki's repertory stalwart player Kati Outinen has a role," notes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "She plays the wife of Marcel (André Wilms), a dignified, stoic man who works as a shoeshiner on the streets. Marcel witnesses an illegal immigrant boy from Gabon, Idrissa (Blondin Miguel...

In a time zone six hours away, the espresso is stockpiled. The line-up is out. The hotels are booked. The contestants are in their corners. It’s time for the industry’s storied annual trade show/summer camp, the Cannes Film Festival. Actors, producers and executives will tend to prioritize networking events, while film programmers, distributors and journalists will gorge on films until the juice runs down their faces. I plan to gobble movies until my eyes glaze over, flickering like bionic screens.

A colleague recently complained about the tendency of festival goers to refer to films not by title but by the director’s name, which strikes him as pretentious. For instance, as avid fans and Filmmaker readers are discovering, trailers and teaser clips have already trickled online for hot-ticket items like The Terrance Malick (Tree of Life), The Lars von Trier (Melancholia) and The Pedro Almodovar (The Skin...

Time to continue our tour de France. Oh, sorry, I meant – tour de Cannes! Next movie we’re going to talk about is a movie titled Le Havre directed by Aki Kaurismaki that is scheduled to premiere In Competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

We’re talking about another “dramatic comedy” but who would expect less from Kaurismaki?

At this moment we know that this project tells the story of a shoeshiner who tries to save an immigrant child in the French port city Le Havre.

Director Kaurismaki had the idea of a film about an African child arriving in Europe three years before the production started. He considered setting the story in Marseille and port cities in Spain and Portugal, but found Le Havre to be the ideal location, saying:

“It is a great place to work and Le Havre is a perfect name for the movie.

Updated through 4/20.

Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux announced that, out of 1715 submissions, 49 features from 33 countries have been selected in total for this year's Cannes Film Festival — four of them made by women, a record. 19 titles are lined up for the Competition so far, leaving room for surprise announcements from here on to the Opening Ceremony on May 11.

Competition

Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Inhabit. As noted yesterday, here's what Variety's Justin Chang had heard as of this past weekend: "In late March, it seemed that Almodóvar, a Cannes veteran who won prizes for All About My Mother and Volver, might skip the event altogether this year. Since 2004's Bad Education, the helmer has presented every one of his films in competition at the May fest, usually following a spring local release. The Sept 2 Spanish release date for The Skin That I Inhabit (which Sony Classics will release Stateside in...