From TIME OUT NEW YORK:

Make it funky: Fatih Akin
The German-Turkish director wants you to step into his Soul Kitchen.
By David Fear

“Does Prince count?” Fatih Akin asks, his face scrunched ever so slightly. The 36-year-old filmmaker is sitting in the lounge of a Soho hotel, lost in thought; his fingers are absentmindedly drumming on his espresso cup. (The clacking suspiciously resembles the bassline for the Commodores’ “Brick House.”) Finally, he replies to a question regarding the first American soul music he ever heard; the judges will accept Prince as an answer. “When I was growing up, you couldn’t escape Purple Rain! For a lot of kids, Prince was our first taste of R&B music.” Suddenly, Akin’s face lights up. “Oh, wait, do you remember that old Levi’s commercial with the guy in the bathtub? That introduced me to Sam Cooke!” He energetically croons the opening line of “Wonderful World”: “Don’t know much about hisssss-tor-yyy.…”

That tune may not be on the soundtrack to Soul Kitchen, Akin’s new film about a ramshackle Hamburg, Germany, restaurant run by a Greek immigrant (played by cowriter Adam Bousdoukos) and a ragtag group of fellow misfits. But given the film’s blasts of vintage funk (The Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing”), sexed-up ’70s jams (Curtis Mayfield’s “Get Down”) and body-moving deep cuts (Kool & the Gang’s “Rated X,” Zapp and Roger’s “I Wanna Be Your Man”), it’s clear that Akin’s early exposure to Cooke & Co. has cultivated a connoisseur’s taste in our nation’s smoothest, grooviest musical exports. For the director of the fatalistic romance Head-On (2004), the use of these songs extended past his admiration of aching falsettos and amming’ on the one; it also boiled down to location, location, location.

“Hamburg is a soul-music city,” Akin says of his birthplace. “It’s a port town that was full of American and British servicemen, who used to bring these records in; during the ’90s, our club scene had places that played Stax/Volt records. Berlin has punk and electronica, but we have soul. The music is part of Hamburg’s identity; Adam and I are both first-generation immigrants who really relate to African-American culture, so it’s part of our identity, too. Plus, that’s what Adam would play in his restaurant.”

Indeed, the movie’s eatery—a cavernous cafeteria that’s transformed into an unlikely boho hot spot, thanks to the movie’s scrappy band of outsiders—is based on a real bistro that Bousdoukos ran for ten years. “I was working as a waiter in a Greek taverna while I was acting,” Bousdoukos says, calling in from Germany. “I took my earnings from movie jobs and ended up buying the place. So one day, I’m sitting in my restaurant, the same tape of old Greek folk songs is on, and I think, I like James Brown and Otis Redding. Why am I not playing that music? I hauled my turntable in and started spinning soul records; suddenly, all these young, hipper customers began showing up. It became a hangout place.”

Akin and Bousdoukos had been close friends since the mid-’80s, and the two had initially thought about turning Bousdoukos’s story into a movie right after Head-On was finished. The filmmaker, however, wasn’t ready to do a comedy at that point; instead, he went on to make a doc on Turkish musicians (2005’s Crossing the Bridge) and another heavy culture-clash tragedy (2007’s The Edge of Heaven). After his longtime producer and mentor, Andreas Thiel, passed away unexpectedly during Heaven’s last week of shooting, Akin felt the need to take on a project involving laughs. “To get out of my grief, I had to make something lighter,” he says. “But even after we’d started making it, I didn’t trust the script, the humor.… I didn’t trust myself to do it right. I mean, unless you have Billy Wilder’s sense of timing, you shouldn’t sign up for a comedy! But Andreas had always pushed for me to do it, so I figured I owed it to him to try.”

What he up ended up directing was a breezy underdog farce marinated in the sort of jagged, punkish verve that colors his earlier work—doing something funny may seem uncharacteristic to him, but Soul Kitchen is definitely a Fatih Akin film. And for an auteur so associated with moody diaspora-culture melodramas, he was happy to shed the Mr. Somber mantle. “People focused too much on the Turkish-meets-German aspect of my films at the expense of everything else,” Akin says. “It’s like showing people a picture you’ve painted, but everybody just fixates on the frame. Soul Kitchen liberated me from that. Now people just talk about the movie.” He smiles and starts tapping again on his cup. Damned if the beat doesn’t almost sound like the one in “When Doves Cry.”

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