General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Soul Kitchen

Soul Kitchen is a 2009 comedy-drama film directed by Fatih Akin about a German-Greek restaurateur in Hamburg who defends his rundown pub against real-estate speculators, the tax office, and his own gambling brother. It premiered in competition at the 66th Venice International Film Festival on 10 September 2009 and won the Special Jury Prize there.¹ The film marked a deliberate change of register for Akin after the dramas Head-On (Gegen die Wand, 2004) and The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite, 2007), and he described it as a love letter to his native Hamburg.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and co-writer	Fatih Akin; screenplay by Akin and Adam Bousdoukos, who also plays the lead³
Premiere and award	World premiere 10 September 2009, Venice Film Festival, in competition; Special Jury Prize¹
German release	25 December 2009; reached place 5 in the German box-office chart in its first week¹^•⁴
Runtime and format	100 minutes (2,747 m), 35 mm, 1:1.85, Fujicolor, Dolby¹
Production	Corazón International (Hamburg) with Pyramide Productions (Paris), NDR, and Dorje Film (Rome); shooting 9 October to 8 December 2008 in Hamburg and Bremen¹
Main cast	Adam Bousdoukos (Zinos), Moritz Bleibtreu (Illias), Birol Ünel (Shayn), Pheline Roggan (Nadine), Anna Bederke (Lucia)³
Reception	Metascore 76 from 20 critic reviews, 19 positive and 1 mixed⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos) runs the Soul Kitchen, a shabby diner in a former industrial hall in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, serving regulars dishes such as fish cakes with potato salad and Hawaii toast while soul, funk, and rembetiko play on the sound system.⁶ His luck turns: his girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) takes a job as a correspondent in Shanghai, Zinos slips a disc trying to move a washing machine, the tax office demands overdue payments, a health inspector threatens to close the place, and the real-estate shark Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring), an old schoolmate, pressures him to sell.⁶

Zinos hires the eccentric gourmet chef Shayn (Birol Ünel), whose ambitious cooking drives away the regulars. The tide changes when a musical school opens next door and the new crowd embraces Shayn's "food for the soul" concept; the restaurant becomes a fashionable in-place, sold out every night.⁶^•⁷ Zinos then signs the restaurant over to his brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), an ex-con on day release, and flies to Shanghai, where he finds Nadine with a new lover. In his absence Illias gambles the restaurant away to Neumann at poker.⁸ The brothers' last chance to win the Soul Kitchen back depends on whether they can stop arguing and work as a team.⁷

Origin and production

The project began in 2003. Akin started typing with a new word-processing program, beginning with the sentence "Adam is broken-hearted, the restaurant could be running better", and finished a first version of the script in five days.⁹ He then set it aside: after Head-On won the Golden Bear and The Edge of Heaven followed, he felt the comedy was not important enough, and he worried he had become fixed on making serious films. His production company Corazón International, founded for Head-On, needed a new project, and he eventually decided to direct the film himself.⁹ Akin has said he found it much harder to make this "nonsense" than his serious films.⁷

The character of Zinos draws on Akin's best friend Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the screenplay and whose own restaurant Sotoris in Hamburg-Ottensen inspired the setting; in the summer of 2003 Akin had schemed to finance the post-production of Head-On with a quick comedy to be shot in that restaurant.⁷^•¹⁰ Akin also dedicated the film to his friend Andreas Tsil, who died during that period and had wanted to see it.⁸

Shooting ran from 9 October to 8 December 2008 in Hamburg and Bremen.¹ The main location was a factory hall on the Industriestrasse in Wilhelmsburg, where the restaurant was built specially for the shoot; the real-life model stands in Altona.¹¹ The film was produced by Akin and Klaus Maeck for Corazón International with NDR, in co-production with Pyramide Productions and Dorje Film, with funding from Filmförderung Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein, nordmedia, the FFA, and the DFFF.¹^•¹² The German censor rated it FSK 12 on 10 August 2009.¹

Reception and awards

Critics largely welcomed Akin's lighter turn. The film scored 76 on Metacritic, with 19 of 20 reviews positive; Stephen Holden of The New York Times (90) called it seriously silly and noted how different it was in spirit from Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, and Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal (80) praised a delirious farce in German and Greek that never flags across its 99 minutes.⁵ Some German viewers who admired Akin's harder dramas found the film too agreeable and reconciliatory.⁶

The film won the Special Jury Prize and the Young Cinema Award for Best Film in Competition at Venice 2009, and the Art Cinema Award at FilmFest Hamburg 2009.¹^•¹³ At the Nordic Film Days Lübeck 2010 it received the North German Film Prize for Best Feature Film, and it won the North German Screenplay Prize for 2009.¹^•⁴ It was nominated for the German Film Award in Gold for Outstanding Feature Film (Akin and Maeck) and for Best Editing (Andrew Bird), and for the European Film Award for Best Film.³^•¹³ The National Board of Review named it one of 2010's top five foreign films.¹³

The Wilhelmsburg hall

The factory hall that housed the film's restaurant became a cultural venue after the shoot and was later famous as the Soul Kitchen location. Plans to renovate it into a cultural center failed, demolition was sealed in 2024 despite protests from the cultural scene, and the teardown of the dilapidated building began in April 2026.¹¹ The film's theme of a neighborhood threatened by gentrification and real-estate speculation thus outlasted its shooting location.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2009 to 2010 › Released in 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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