Soul Kitchen
Short description
Zinos Kazantsakis runs a small restaurant called Soul Kitchen in a working-class district of Hamburg. The place serves simple food to a handful of regulars, and it keeps Zinos busy while his girlfriend Nadine is away in Shanghai for work. Hired help arrives in the form of Shayn Weiss, a talented but difficult chef whose refined cooking drives off the old clientele even as it draws a new crowd. Meanwhile Zinos's brother Ilias, recently out of prison, gets involved with the restaurant, and a former schoolmate named Neumann keeps pressing Zinos to sell the property and its land.
Fatih Akin directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Adam Bousdoukos, who plays Zinos. It followed Akin's Head-On, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul and The Edge of Heaven, and came before Goodbye Berlin and In the Fade. Moritz Bleibtreu plays Ilias, with Pheline Roggan, Anna Bederke, Birol Ünel and Dorka Gryllus in supporting roles.
Released in 2009, the film cost about 4 million dollars and took roughly 18 million worldwide, a strong return on a modest production. IMDb users rate it 7.2 out of 10 from 43,000 votes, while TMDB users give it 6.9 from 616 votes. A critics' rating of 6.5 from 59 reviews sits below the audience scores, suggesting viewers responded to it more warmly than reviewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is dedicated to the memory of Monika Bleibtreu. The actress who played Grandmother Nadine and the mother of Moritz Bleibtreu passed away a few months before its premiere on May 13, 2009.
- The director Fatih Akin's wife actively helped him in the actor selection process during casting.
- In preparation for his role, actor Birol Ünel took lessons from Güngörmüs Ali, chef and owner of the Hamburg restaurant Le Canard Nouveau.
- A small Hamburg restaurant, La Taverna, owned by Fatih Akin's friend Adam Bousduksu, served as the main source of inspiration for the overall atmosphere of the film and individual plot elements. They often met with friends at this restaurant, discussed various events, drank, and sang and danced to music.
- A club called "Soul Kitchen" actually existed in Hamburg in the 90s. Although it had been closed for a long time and had no connection to the film, the producers still had to obtain permission to use that name.
- The process of writing the screenplay for the future film began back in 2003, when Fatih Akin was simply trying out new software designed for writers and screenwriters. The first version of the script was born in five days, but then the project was shelved for several years.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
