Shadows in Paradise

Shadows in Paradise follows Nikander, a garbage truck driver in Helsinki whose hopes of making it as an entrepreneur collapse when his business partner dies. One evening he meets Ilona, a supermarket cashier whose life has also stalled, and the two lonely people begin, cautiously, to move toward each other. The film is the first part of Aki Kaurismäki's proletarian trilogy, which continued with Ariel and The Match Factory Girl, and it is the earliest of the director's features listed here.

Kaurismäki wrote and directed the film, and it was produced by his brother Mika Kaurismäki. Matti Pellonpää plays Nikander and Kati Outinen plays Ilona, with Sakari Kuosmanen, Esko Nikkari, Kylli Köngäs and Pekka Laiho in supporting roles. Running 74 minutes, it is a comedy-drama-romance set in a rainy Finnish capital.

On TMDB the film holds a rating of 7.3 from 449 votes, which suggests a modest but appreciative audience. It came early in Kaurismäki's directing career, before the other titles in the trilogy, and it established the working relationships with Pellonpää and Outinen that recur across his later films.