Aki Kaurismäki was born on April 4, 1957, in Orimattila, Finland. He began his film career as a script-writer and actor in the films of his elder brother Mika, (born 1955) also a film director.
Aki Kaurismäki produces his own films through Sputnik Oy, a company he founded in 1987.
Kaurismäki was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 for his film The Man Without A Past. He also won the Luis Buñuel Prize at the Huesca Film Festival in 2002.
In 2003, Kaurismäki's movie "The Man Without a Past" was also nominated as a finalist to run for the Academy Award, in the Best Foreign Languege Film category. Kaurismäki announced well in advance, however, that he would not honor the award ceremonies with his precence.
In the fall of 2006, Kaurismäki asked the Finnish Film Institute to withdraw his latest movie - Lights in the Dusk - from competition for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2007.
Kaurismäki offered no reasons for his action, which left Finland without an entry at the Academy Awards. In this respect, Kaurismäki resembles his compatriot actor Albert Salmi, who declined an Oscar nimination in the Bester Actor category in 1958, for his role in The Brothers Karamazov.
Aki Kaurismäki and his older brother Mika are the pre-eminent film making team from Finland. No other film-maker from his homeland or indeed anywhere in the world is quite able to celebrate the lives of such uniquely inarticulate, alienated, unglamorous or misunderstood characters with such style and dry wit.
Despite his success, Kaurismäki still shoots cheap, to retain his artistic independence. His films have a cult following among style gurus, alienated youths and of course Finns, yet are still championed in the pages of cahiers du cinema and retrospectives the world over.
His tale of a Russian rock band touring USA - Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989) - has probably been his most visible work. It is not his best, however. Drifting Clouds (1996) and Take Care Of Your Scarf, Tatjana (1994) are two of his movies taken most seriously internationally, perhaps. Kaurismäki's Cannes winner, The Man Without A Past (2002), might prove to be his best yet.
In 1983, Aki Kaurismäki made his debut film with a modernisation of Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment (Rikos Ja Rangaistus). He wrote his older brother Mika's first two films - "The Liar" and "Worthless" - as well.
Drifting Clouds is dedicated to the extraordinary comic actor Matti Pellonpaa, a regular fixture in Kaurismaki's films before his untimely death in 1995. Poker-faced Kati Outinen, a familiar visage in the director's pool of regular collaborators, won Best Actress Award at Cannes in 2002, for her acting work in "The Man Without A Past".
In American and European cinema, passive characters (especially if they are the lead characters) are rare indeed. In Kaurismäkiland they abound, proving that an empty face and a blank expression are just as cinematic as page upon page of hip dialogue.
Critic Jonathan Romney describes the Finn's themes: "Downbeat blue-collar realism, depression, absurdist farce and rock and roll". If you also said overgrown teenage anti-heroes consuming inordinate amounts of vodka, smoking incessantly and staring into space for long periods, you could only mean one man.
Others have even pointed to a latent 'death wish' in his work - in his second feature, Calamari Union (1985), eighteen men take a journey across Helsinki by subway and perish one by one, a plot the Finn rationalised with a belief that 'dying is more poetic than going to jail'. This view is unapparent in his upbeat later work, however.
Aki Kaurismäki and his older brother Mika feasted on a diet of three films a day at the Finnish Film Archive where they worshipped Godard, Ozu, and American Film Noir. Writer Peter Cowie sums them up thus: "they showed a scant disrespect for all things reputable and a passionate respect for all things disreputable".
Jim Jarmusch could be described as Kaurismäki's cinematic alter-ego. Jarmusch makes a cameo appearance in Leningrad Cowboys Go America, and uses Helsinki as one of the locations in his film Night On Earth.
Pictures by Sputnik Oy
Scenes from the film "The man without a past".
Click to enlarge pictures.
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