Soul Kitchen

Filmmaker Fatih Akin takes a change of pace from heavy drama (such as his award-winning The Edge of Heaven) with this boisterous, good-natured comedy that furthers his cinematic exploration of the new multicultural Europe. Greek-German Zinos (co-writer Adam Bousdoukos) operates a greasy spoon called Soul Kitchen in a Hamburg warehouse. If it isn't bad enough that his girlfriend (Pheline Roggan) has left for Shanghai, and his jailbird younger brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) is asking him for a phony job, but Zinos also manages to hurt his back, and so he hires a replacement chef (Birol Ünel), a gypsy with serious "nouvelle cuisine" tendencies. Suddenly Soul Kitchen has become The Happening Place with its terrific food and soul-and-funk-infused music…as well as the latest target for predatory real estate developers. In German with English subtitles. With Anna Bederke, Dorka Gryllus, Udo Kier. Writers: Fatih Akin, Adam Bousdoukos. Director: Fatih Akin. (Germany 2009) 99 min.