The legend says that Kaurismäki senior earned his living as a painter of façades in the Finnish town Kuusankoski. In the winter of 1976 the painting season was over and Mika bought the book History of Film by Peter Von Bagh



Author biographies of Pedro and Augustin Almodovar have shown to us that the older brother always remains in the shadow of the young one. Unlike them, at the last Oscar ceremony it was the older Coen brother who was in charge while the younger one kept quiet. However, behind the camera they function in perfect tandem, their connectedness is sometimes even closer than it may seem, especially at the beginning of their careers. It is similar in the case of the Kaurismäki brothers, even though it may seem that Mika has stayed in the shadow of the more famous Aki. The legend says that Kaurismäki senior earned his living as a painter of façades in the Finnish town Kuusankoski. In the winter of 1976 the painting season was over and Mika bought the book History of Film by Peter Von Bagh, and read it from cover to cover. It was this book that inspired him to become a director.


Mika’s first film The Liar was his graduation thesis and he made it together with his brother Aki who was then a student of journalism. In this film, strongly influenced by the French New Wave, Aki was the main actor and also co-wrote the screenplay. The brothers collaborated on Mika’s next project as well, the documentary Saimaa-ilmio about the Finnish rock scene. Actually, the most intriguing phase of Mika’s opus happened in the 1980s and it is at that time that he was closest to his brother’s twisted sensibility. At that time the Kaurismäkis were sort of a commune founded in parallel with the establishment of two cult clubs in Helsinki, Corona and Moscow. Mika was their owner while Aki was more or less in charge of music and drinks. They both worked with their favorite actors and good friends, Matti Pellonpaa and Kari Vaananen, who were the trademarks of their film production company Villealfa Filmproductions. It was then that Mika started the legendary Midnight Sun Film Festival, and opened a chain of art movie theatres Andorra that became practically a film institution. This was the time when Mika made his best (road) films. Unlike Aki’s heroes who almost never leave Helsinki, Mika’s characters are cosmopolites. They include Sicilian murderers in Helsinki (Rosso), Finnish taxi drivers in Berlin (Helsinki Napoli), American musicians in Latvia (Honey Baby) and Finnish versions of Buster Keaton in Istanbul (Zombie and the Ghost Train). Aki’s house bands such as Marko Haavisto & Poutahaukat are replaced by bands with equally colorful names such as Harry and the Mulefucking (the author pointed out that he was inspired for the film Zombie by a story about his three friends, musicians who died from self-destruction).


In the 1990s the Kaurismäki brothers parted, Mika widened his scope and flirted with the Hollywood mainstream (Condition Red, Los Angeles Without a Map) even though he never lost interest in losers from the edges of society. Afterwards he moved to Brasil and worked on a series of musical documentaries and continued his hospitality career by opening a cult bar in Rio Mika's Bar. Then he left for the Amazon and embarked on a nostalgic film adventure with Jim Jarmusch and Sam Fuller (Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made). At the very end of his travels in this film he steps into a canoe and says: It is time to return to the uncivilized world!” - the same world that had first inspired Mika to make films. (Dragan Rubeša)



P.S. This text was written while listening to the beautiful soundtrack from Mika’s film Moro No Brasil.