Juha

Aki Kaurismäki made this film in 1999, yet it is a silent film: black and white, with dialogue delivered through intertitles, and it is widely described as the last silent film of the twentieth century. In the director's own words, the aim was to bring the language of classical silent cinema back to life. Marja, a farmer's wife married to a much older man, is seduced by a charming stranger whose car breaks down nearby, is promised city life, leaves her husband to go with him, and discovers she has been enslaved in a brothel. This is the fourth screen adaptation of Juhani Aho's 1911 novel, a book with a curious lineage in Finnish cinema: its 1956 version was both the first Finnish feature in color and the first in widescreen, and it was also adapted into two separate operas. Kaurismäki moved the story from the novel's eighteenth century into the second half of the twentieth. It premiered in the Forum of Young Cinema at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, screened with live orchestra, and took an honorable mention. Who it's for: Admirers of Kaurismäki's minimalism and of formal experiments that return to the silent idiom. Who it's not for: Not for viewers unaccustomed to silent film, since it runs entirely on intertitles and is deliberately slow.