Finland • d: Aki Kaurismäki • 1h 21m • English subtitles
For more than 30 years, Aki Kaurismäki (Drifting Clouds, Le Havre) has crafted lucid fables about people with everyday struggles, including artists, laborers and immigrants. He portrays marginalized outcasts with a detached tragi-comic tenderness: these are his people. Kaurismäki’s latest, a masterful distillation of prior themes, emerges as a somber romantic comedy. The down-on-his-luck Holappa (the acclaimed actor Jussi Vatanen) and the sensitive supermarket cashier Ansa (the radiant Alma Pöysti), two quiet loners, spot each other in a bar and then go to a movie together (it’s, of all things, Jim Jarmusch’s macabre The Dead Don’t Die, which Ansa considers a comedy). Accidents, alcohol and their own vulnerabilities keep Ansa and Holappa apart. Will the persistence of desire draw them back together? The cinematographer Timo Salminen, a longtime Kaurismäki collaborator, paints the film’s bars, factories and rain-drenched streets in memorably saturated colors; Postyi’s clear-eyed, sensitive gaze takes the movie straight into our hearts.
About the Telluride Film Festival
The Telluride Film Festival has been, for the last 49 years, a celebration of the art of film: honoring the great masters of the cinema, discovering the rare and unknown, bringing new works by the world’s greatest directors and the latest in American independent film to a small mountain town in Colorado. The New York Times called Telluride “the smallest, most original, and most stimulating of the major festivals,” while Entertainment Tonight simply said it was “the world’s best festival.”
About Telluride By The Sea
The Music Hall and the Telluride Film Festival collaborate on an exclusive presentation of six new features, brought directly from their Colorado debuts. This unique and intimate Portsmouth event treats audience members from across the Northeast to an exclusive peek into the Telluride experience—packing one September weekend in Portsmouth with the latest international cinema, private parties, great music, delicious food, and inspired conversations with other cinephiles of all ages, tastes, and backgrounds.
Schedule
Fri., 9/15 • 7pm • The Holdovers
Sat., 9/16 • 12:30pm • The Teachers’ Lounge
Sat., 9/16 • 3pm • The Promised Land
Sat., 9/16 • 7pm • Poor Things
Sun., 9/17 • 12pm • Fallen Leaves
Sun., 9/17 • 2:30pm • Anatomy of a Fall
Sun., 9/17 • 6:30pm • American Symphony
