Elina Salo

Iris has a dead-end job in a match-factory, lives with her dour and forbidding parents, and her social life is a disaster.

Aki Kaurismäki returns to France with this sun-kissed utopian parable. One of his most politically resonant films, Le Havre echoes The Man Without a Past’s ruminations on community and resilience, albeit this time (via a hat tip to Carl Dreyer’s Ordet) with a nod to the vagaries of the divine.

This droll tale of longing and awkward romance follows two misfits - a coffee addict and a vodka- soaked mechanic - as they hit the road in their Soviet- built Volga.