He is best known for the award-winning Drifting Clouds (1996), The Man Without a Past (2002), Le Havre (2011), The Other Side of Hope (2017) and Fallen Leaves (2023), as well as Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989).

[1] 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.

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.

[5] In Helsinki, Kaurismäki is the co-owner of a complex, Andorra, that incorporates a cinema, several bars and a pool hall featuring a giant poster for Robert Bresson's L’Argent.

He has been called an auteur,[7][8] since he writes, directs, produces and usually edits the films himself, and thus introduces his personal "drollery and deadpan"[9] style.

[12] In March 2014, however, he reconciled, saying that "in order to maintain my humble film oeuvre accessible to a potential audience, I have ended up in rendering it to digital in all its present and several of its as yet unknown forms".

In his view, the social and political ramifications of class structures and lack of economic parity render lower-class workers replaceable cogs in an outdated machine.

The letter stated that "Labour's election manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership offers a transformative plan that prioritises the needs of people and the planet over private profit and the vested interests of a few.

"[16] In a 2007 interview with the film scholar Andrew Nestingen, Kaurismäki said: "The real disgrace here is Finland's refugee policy, which is shameful.

We refuse refugee status on the flimsiest of grounds and send people back to secure places like Darfur, Iraq, and Somalia.