30/12/2002 - Boosted by its Cannes awards, Finland's candidate for the Oscar, Kaurismaki's The Man Without A Past, distributed by Pyramide, is proving very popular with Gallic audiences

Finnish director, Aki Kaurismäki’s latest feature, The Man Without A Past [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is performing very well at the French box offices : after seven weeks on general release, the film has already attracted over half a million filmgoers.
Bolstered by having won two important awards at the last edition of the Cannes film festival (the Jury Grand Prix and best actress for Katia Outinen), The Man Without A Past was first released by Pyramide onto 157 , however excellent word-of-mouth caused them to make a further 101 prints. All told this is an excellent performance for Kaurismäki, a director with a good following among refined cinephiles but whose films have never reached the French mainstream, much less performed anything like as well at the box office. His 1996 feature, Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds) sold 131,000 tickets and his 1990 I Hired A Contract Kller just 68,000.
The success of The Man Without A Past put Kaurismäki third in the 2002 league table of best performing European films in France. He is preceded by Robert Altman’s Anglo-American co-production, Gosford Park (821,000 tickets sold) and Pedro Almodovar’s Speak With Her [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2.1 million).

(Translated from French)