Skip to main content
Lights in the Dusk film image; man sitting in the corner of a restaurant

Lights in the Dusk

Laitakaupungin Valot

Leading Lights

This event has passed

Koistinen — a preternaturally unlucky and systematically denigrated security guard — sees his life spiral into chaos as he gets involved with the wrong company. To advance the interests of their voracious greed, a gang of kleptocratic thugs move in to exploit Koistinen’s central weakness: his loneliness and longing to connect. While that may sound like the Facebook business model, this is a stinging indictment from Finland’s greatest living ironist.

We are so lucky to watch this! Since its release in 2006, Lights in the Dusk has been excessively difficult to find in digital media. It remains an underappreciated work but, along with (the better-known) The Other Side of Hope (2017), it is one of Kaurismäki’s boldest expressions. At once very funny and very sad, Lights in the Dusk repurposes the cinematic language of film noir and gangster flicks to create a wholly singular proletarian satire of late-stage capitalism. This is Kaurismäki at his most angry and most compassionate.

 

Community Partner

Director
Cast

Janne Hyytiäinen, Maria Järvenhelmi, Maria Heiskanen, Ilkka Koivula

Credits
Country of Origin

Finland/Germany/France

Year

2006

Language

In Finnish and Russian with English subtitles

Film Contact
18+
77 min
Award Winners Comedy Drama Legendary Filmmakers Romance

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits & Director

Producer

Aki Kaurismäki

Cinematography

Timo Salminen

Screenwriter

Aki Kaurismäki

Editor

Aki Kaurismäki

Original Music

Carlos Gardel, Giacomo Puccini

Aki Kaurismäki headshot

Aki Kaurismäki

Filmography: Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989); Drifting Clouds (1996); The Man Without a Past (2002); Le Havre (2011); The Other Side of Hope (2017); Fallen Leaves (2023)

Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre

Orwell: 2+2=5

Dir. Raoul Peck
119 min

Oscar-nominated director Raoul Peck reimagines 1984 in this urgent essay on power, language, and control. With narration by Damian Lewis, it’s a chilling portrait of how Orwell’s warnings became our reality.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Wisdom of Happiness

Dir. Philip Delaquis & Barbara Miller
90 min

An audience with the Dalia Lama, who, at 90, looks back on his life and shares the tenets of Buddhism as a practical guide to surviving the 21st Century with joy and compassion.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Left-Handed Girl

Dir. Shih-Ching Tsou
109 min

Co-written and edited by Sean Baker (Anora), Shi-Ching Tsou's heartwarming solo feature debut follows a single mom in Taipei who is too consumed with her noodle stand to keep tabs on her five-year-old daughter's burgeoning shoplifting habit.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Sembene!

Dir. Jason Silverman & Samba Gadjigo
89 min

Sembene! tells the unbelievable true story of the father of African cinema, the self-taught novelist and filmmaker who fought, against enormous odds, a 50-year battle to return African stories to Africans.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Train Dreams

Dir. Clint Bentley
104 min

A lovely, ruminative movie set in the Pacific Northwest in the first half of the last century. Robert (Joel Edgerton) is a lumberjack, a taciturn man who comes to appreciate the life slipping between his fingers.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Köln 75

Dir. Ido Fluk
116 min

The true story behind the greatest solo concert in jazz history, this is Keith Jarrett's legendary 1975 Köln Concert — as organized by 18-year-old rebel music promoter Vera Brandes. Fun, inventive and feminist, it's the Bend It Like Beckham of jazz films.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
More info

Sold Out