Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema Kino Laika Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited, Including Beer-Loving Dogs
20.09.2023 - 09:25
/ variety.com
Marta Balaga Welcome to Kino Laika: Aki Kaurismäki and Mika Lätti’s cinema in Karkkila, an hour away from Helsinki. A place where love for movies – and dogs – meets ghosts of cinema’s past. “One time, I had a 35mm copy of the Lumière brothers’ film ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.’ I lent it to some cinema and it never came back.
And now, I have forgotten which cinema it was,” recalls Kaurismäki, who, like Lätti, has been a resident of Karkkila, a modest town of 9,000, for decades now. “I have lived here for 38 years and I like it a lot, but we never had a cinema here before. To see movies, local people had to travel to the next town or even Helsinki.
Not anymore. It’s wonderful to offer them this chance,” he adds. “Karkkila has been a good place for us both and we wanted to give something back to this town.
I had tears in my eyes when someone said: ‘It has been 30 years since I last went to the cinema and now you came along,’” Lätti says. “I have been repeating the same anecdotes when showing people around and then I realized they tell the same stories bringing over their friends. They are all Laika guides now.” Located in an old factory hall, Laika welcomes all.
Including the workers from the next-door foundry. “We have a happy hour because of them, cheap beer from 2-4 p.m. on Fridays.
They come after their shift, all dusty, and sit next to the ‘culture’ people from Helsinki. Side by side, like in that restaurant in Aki’s movie ‘Drifting Clouds.’ Maybe that’s where this whole idea came from,” says Lätti. But in Kino Laika, named after the famous Soviet space dog and Kaurismäki’s own photogenic canines, commemorated on one of the walls – with one Laika playing in “The Bohemian Life” and another in “Le Havre” –
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