The man without a past

A man gets badly beaten up and injured. He loses everything: his memory, his identity, and his previous life. Finding himself completely alone in what is, for him, a foreign city and excluded from ordinary society, the nameless man begins a quest for survival. Along the way, he’s helped by some other social outcasts.  In 'The Man Without A Past', Aki Kaurismäki – perhaps the most melancholy of Europe’s major filmmakers –  tells a wonderfully tender tale of friendship, love, egoism, structural violence, hope, and the fear of failure and poverty. The result is often sad, frequently funny and completely devoid of false sentiment. And, almost incidentally, Kaurismäki creates a counterbalance to the weight of the history (or histories) which define an individual – simply through his presence and the power of his actions.