ABSTRACT This is an interview with the Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, the leading talent in his country's miniscule motionpicture industry. Kaurismäki's films—among them The Match Factory Girl and The Man Without a Past—are straightforward, seriocomic studies infused with a unique sense of the ridiculous and even the absurd. As an interviewee, their maker himself is just such a seriocomic “study.”