“Aki Kaurismäki’s image of Helsinki, like that of the author of this book, was largely formed through movie theaters. When we first came to know the city, the outskirts were mostly unpopulated, but buses and trams still led to dark, distant cinemas that hadn’t yet been molded into multiplexes. Perhaps there’s something of this atmosphere in the tram rides in Drifting Clouds. Soon, all the movie theaters would cluster in the city center, within a radius of a few hundred meters, with financially positive but psychologically negative consequences—not to mention the spirit of cinema, of which little remained. After traversing long, winding corridors, we now enter theaters permeated with a persistent smell of popcorn. Interchangeable films parade across a tiny screen—if the viewer doesn’t have a ticket for theater six, they should calmly buy one for theater eight, without the slightest fear that a personal creation, or in other words, a film, might be projected there.” auteur film—When I partnered with the Kaurismäki brothers, twenty years after the Joukola at the Filmoteca, to try to revive the two Andorra art-house cinemas, Aki's first gesture was to throw away the previous owner's two popcorn machines. (…) Two examples can attest to Helsinki's defunct film culture. All of Godard's films from the 1960s were distributed commercially, something that certainly didn't happen anywhere else except in France. And, in the 1970s, Bresson made more money in Helsinki than in Paris.”

Peter von Bagh, Aki Kaurismäki, Cahiers du cinema – Festival International du film de Locarno, Paris, 2006