ONCE UPON A TIME… LE HAVRE

Protagonists :

• Ari KAURISMÄKI, director
• André WILMS, actor, role of Marcel
• Kati OUTINEN, actress, role of Arletty
• Evelyne DIDI, actress, role of Yvette
• Elina SALO, actress, role of Claire
• Jean-Pierre DARROUSSIN, actor, role of Commissioner Monet
• Gilles CHARMANT, actor, role of Nader’s father
• Wouter ZOON, actor, head decorator
• LITTLE BOB, in his own role as a rocker…
• Peter von BAGH, filmmaker

Once upon a time… Le Havre is the thirty-seventh documentary film in the collection ” A Film and its Era ” created by Marie Genin and Serge July and produced by Folamour Productions. This documentary film recounts the genesis, making and reception of Le Havre, a film by Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki shot in 2011. Le Havre tells the fate of a young African boy who landed illegally in this Normandy port and is taken in hiding by a couple of modest people in an old working-class district of the city. This documentary aims to put Kaurismaki’s film back into the context of its time, when, at the turn of the 2000s, Europe adopted an extremely repressive policy towards ever-increasing illegal immigration. A double phenomenon that has provoked a litany of tragedies, of which Aki Kaurismaki’s film is a profoundly humanist denunciation.