Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki returns with this politically-charged fairy tale. The life of self-taught intellectual and shoeshiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms) has an unexpected twist of fate when he discovers African refugee Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) who has just emerged from a cargo ship container in the industrial French port city of Le Havre. It’s a stylized character study that moves back and forth between deadpan dark humour and the comfortable, comic charms of classic cinema. Idrissa is absorbed into Marcel’s working-class community, pursued by a police detective, and Marcel must figure out how to get the boy across the channel to England, where the rest of his family has gone.

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Presented in French with English subtitles.