1981 Saimaa Phenomenon (documentary) 1983 Crime and Punishment 1985 Calamari Union 1986 Shadows in Paradise 1986 Rocky IV (short) 1987 Hamlet in the Business World 1987 Rich Little Bitch (short) 1987 Thru the Wire (short) 1988 Ariel 1989 Leningrad Cowboys Go America 1989 Dirty Hands (TV) 1990 Match Factory Girl 1990 I Hired a Contract Killer 1992 Those Were the Days (short) 1993 These Boots (short) 1994 Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses 1994 Total Balalaika Show (documentary) 1996 Sürüklenen Bulutlar 1996 Broker (short) 1996 Oo always a human (short) 1999 Juha 2002 Geçmişi Olmayan Adam 2002 Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet 2004 Visions of Europe 2004 Bico (short documentary) 2006 Laitakaupungin valot 2007 Chacun son cinéma ou Ce Petit coup au Coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence 2011 Le Havre 2012 Centro Històrico 2012 Juive Widow and Grand Slam: Bluesia Pieksämäki asamella (short documentary)
Aki Kaurismäki was born in Orimatilla, Finland in 1957. He studied journalism at the University of Tampere where he was active in film clubs. He entered into the film world in the early eighties as an actor and as a script-writer in his brother Mika's films. He directed his first full-length feature "Crime and Punishment", an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel. His other adaptations include "Hamlet Goes Business" (1987), in which he altered the classic royal drama into grotesque intrigues in industrial settings in Helsinki, and "Bohemian Life" (1992), a novel that became popular thanks to Puccini's opera, La Boheme. Kaurismäki has proved himself as a stylistically and thematically coherent and systematic filmmaker personality characterized by a stripped, disciplined expression, awareness of tradition, and rough, often black humour. His way of presenting his marginal, dispossessed characters combines criticism of current values with a disciplined moral pathos. He started to work on his 'worker trilogy' -defined by the director as the 'loser trilogy'- with "Shadows in Paradise" (1986) a Finnish love story between a rubbish collector and a supermarket cashier steering clear of both romantic illusions and one-dimensional everyday realism. He completed the trilogy with "Ariel" (1988), the adventures of an unemployed and homeless man in the concrete jungle of Helsinki, and "The Match Factory Girl" (1990), a meeting of working class description and Andersen's fairy tale. An artist who sees music as the symbol of a lifestyle and as a defiant gesture directed towards conventional rules, he also made a series of three films about "the worst rock band in the world": The Leningrad Cowboys. He recently focused back to his country's problems with a new trilogy about unemployment in Finland. "Drifting Clouds"(1996) tells the story of a couple facing unemployment and struggling for a dignified existence. "The Man Without a Past" (2002), the second film of the trilogy was
