April 23, 2010 02:35PM EDT

Q&A: Soul Kitchen

The familiar sights and sounds of the Tribeca Film Festival were already in place as the first full day of screenings hit: rush ticket lines, enthusiastic, curious crowds, beeping ticket scanners, workers wearing headsets. That moment before the house lights go down, especially in a festival setting where you haven’t been inundated with trailers and multi-million dollar hype for a movie, can be thrilling: What on earth will this movie be like?

The eager crowd let out an audible collective “awww” when the Tribeca spokesperson apologized that the director Fatih Akin was not able to attend. But as the lights went down and the Tribeca promos began, their enthusiasm rallied. There was even applause for the Tribeca Sponsors title card! As the film began with its charming 70s-influenced “wakka wakka” score, the director didn’t feel so very absent after all. Can’t you always feel a director’s presence when a movie is so confidently made? 

Fans of Akin’s brooding and potent films Head On (Gegen die Wand) and The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) are in for a delightful surprise. His latest feature has a similarly contemporary international appeal (Greek, German, Turkish and Chinese flavors emerge) but this time it’s in service of a high-strung comedy with slapstick gags.

Soul Kitchen is a comedy about Greek-German restaurateur Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos, who also co-wrote the screenplay) and his misadventures running a restaurant named “Soul Kitchen” in Hamburg, Germany. Zinos’s girlfriend is leaving the country, his restaurant teeters volatilely between abject failure and runaway success, his lead waitress is full of surprises, his old “friend” is circling the restaurant like a vulture, his thieving brother is on parole, he owes back taxes, and his back is just killing him. The award-winning director Akin juggles a huge cast of characters and plot revelations with as much ease as the chef (Birol Unel from Head On) slices vegetables and throws knives.
 
The Village East Cinemas, with its peculiar layout and old exposed brick walls, turned out to be an ideal place to view Soul Kitchen, since the film gets much character from its environment. The title restaurant looks like an industrial warehouse, but it’s improbably cozy nonetheless. As the diverse first-night Festival crowd filed out of the theater, you could almost feel the enthusiastic word of mouth percolating. They’ll be recommending this restaurant movie to friends. Good food movies tend to leave an audience feeling satiated, whether there’s a Q&A or not.

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