Soul Kitchen

Fatih Akin:
Soul Kitchen (Germany, 2009)
102 min. - German, Greek - Finnish subtitles
Distributor: Future Film
K-13

Fatih Akin did it again. The story of Soul Kitchen is enchanting. The German-Greek Zinos has a shabby restaurant named Soul Kitchen. The restaurant business is bad and his love life is not getting along any better. When his girlfriend Nadine moves to Shanghai for work, Zinos is ready to sell the restaurant and leave for the Far East with his girl. However, his misdeeding brother, who just got out of prison, shows up at the restaurant begging for a job. He ends up becoming an in-house DJ in Soul Kitchen, and a new chef, who has a thing for knife throwing, starts whipping up gourmet dishes spiced with love potions.

Soon Soul Kitchen becomes the hottest place in the city, but Zinos has new problems to solve: what to do about the girlfiend In Shanghai, and what to answer a slick business man's generous offers?

It would have been easy to bake a romantic Hollywood cream cake of these ingredients, but the result is much more interesting. The awarded and praised Soul Kitchen is a combination of crazy comedy, warmly romantic drama and a deep depiction of family relations. The charmingly convivial film manages to grasp the racking atmosphere of relationship traps in the masterous way only Fatih Akin knows. The music played in the restaurant and the grubbier neighbourhoods of Hamburg finish the edgy style. Soul Kitchen cuts deeper than a Japanese kitchen knife!

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Fatih Akin was born in 1973 to a Turkish family in Hamburg. The confusion caused by two identities, the interaction of the East and the West and cultural clashes have been important themes in Akin's production. In Germany, Akin has become the voice of the Turkish minority.

Akin Started his career in the mid-90s directing short films. Since then he has directed multiple feature films and written and produced his own production. His fourth film Head-on (2004) was Akin's break-through and brought him numerous awards in notable European film festivals.

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Soul Kitchen

Wed 17th Nov at 9:00pm at Tapio 4
Sat 20th Nov at 4:20pm at Tapio 2