page_title: Aki Kaurismäki
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Aki Kaurismäki / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki at Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, 2012. Suomi: Elokuvaohjaaja Aki Kaurismäki Sodankylän elokuvajuhlilla, 2012.
context_page_description: Aki Olavi Kaurismäki is a Finnish screenwriter and film director. He is best known for the award-winning Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, Le Havre and The Other Side of Hope, as well as for the mockumentary Leningrad Cowboys Go America. He is described as Finland's best-known film director.
context_section_description: After graduating in media studies from the University of Tampere, Kaurismäki worked as a bricklayer, postman, and dish-washer, long before pursuing his interest in cinema, first as a critic, and later as a screenwriter & director.  He started his career as a co-screenwriter and actor in films made by his older brother, Mika Kaurismäki. He played the main role in Mika's film The Liar (1981). Together they founded the production company Villealfa Filmproductions and later the Midnight Sun Film Festival. His debut as an independent director was Crime and Punishment (1983), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel set in modern Helsinki. He gained worldwide attention with Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989). In 1989 he emigrated with his wife, Paula Oinonen, to Portugal, saying "in all of Helsinki there is no place left where I could place my camera". In 1992, the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby declared Kaurismäki “an original ... one of cinema’s most distinctive and idiosyncratic new artists, and possibly one of the most serious.... [He] could well turn out to be the seminal European filmmaker of the ’90s.”
caption: Aki Kaurismäki in 2012
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