Right at the beginning, we see a man coming out of a heap of charcoal inside a boat. He is Khaled, a Syrian immigrant who enters Finland through this method. The visual metaphor is obvious: his appearance is filthy, and as he walks the ways of a new country, he looks like a ghost wanting his invisibility to hide his condition. However, he makes the decision to show himself, to ask for asylum to this new country where he admits to have arrived by mistake. On the other side of the barricade is Wikström, a calm Finnish man who decides to change his life: to sell his shirt business, bet everything on a poker game and, with the earnings, buy a bankrupt restaurant. It is he who will welcome Khaled when he escapes from the temporary shelter for immigrants to avoid having the police escort him to the airport. The relationship between them opens a door to the other side of hope, to a world of a humanism made of small gestures. Kaurismäki presents this film in its characteristic style, where lonely and introspective men and women have surprising gestures of humanity. They are people who change, even if their daily lives are black and white copies of a happy life. These gestures share a liberating side of the film with music and humor - exquisite, often black, but particularly sharp. After "Le Havre" (2011), this is the second film of the "port trilogy", and one of the most talked films of the last edition of the Berlin Film Festival, where he received the Best Director Award. In a year of celebration in Curtas, the festival opens with one of the most esteemed authors, one that was honored with a retrospective in its second edition, in 1994. (DR)