Soul Kitchen

After the wrenching dramas Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, the German-Turkish director Fatih Akın changed register entirely with Soul Kitchen (2009), a raucous, big-hearted comedy that he described as a love letter to his native Hamburg. It won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in competition.

Adam Bousdoukos, Akın's friend and co-writer, plays Zinos, the hapless owner of a rundown harbour-district restaurant whose every attempt to keep his life and his business afloat invites fresh disaster. Akın fills the film with a vibrant ensemble of misfits — a volatile chef, a slippery brother, predatory developers — and powers it along with the kind of soul and funk soundtrack that gives the place its name. The comedy is broad and warm, rooted in a real affection for the city's working-class immigrant milieu.

Critics welcomed the lighter side of a director best known for intensity, and the film became a sizeable hit in Germany. Beneath the slapstick runs Akın's recurring theme of belonging and the makeshift families that form around food, music and place. Joyful, scrappy and infectiously good-natured, Soul Kitchen is a crowd-pleaser with genuine soul, and a reminder that one of European cinema's fiercest dramatists can also throw a very good party. Bousdoukos and the ensemble give the film a lived-in warmth, and its embrace of food, music and chosen family has kept it a perennial crowd-pleaser long after its Venice premiere.