Sunday, October 4, 2026
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East
A restaurant can bring people together. War can turn that same place into a battleground, a refuge, and a test of who people become when survival takes over. That tension gives director Wen Muye's "Once Upon a Time in the Middle East" (歡迎來龍餐館 | China 2026 | in Mandarin/Arabic/English | 141 min.) its most compelling idea. Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city, the film brings together people who have little in common, then lets war expose the loyalties, compromises, and moral choices that were easier to ignore when life was still ordinary.
Xu Fu (Shen Teng), a cook from Shenyang burdened by family debts, takes a lucrative head-chef job at the struggling Dragon Restaurant because he sees it as a temporary stop: make enough money and go home. The city is never identified as a specific country, while the only real country explicitly named is the United States. The conflict that eventually engulfs the city strongly evokes the 2003 Iraq War, though the film deliberately keeps its setting broad enough to suggest a larger history of Middle Eastern wars.
Xu Fu soon finds himself invested in the restaurant and the people around it. Ma Junsheng (Jiang Qiming), the restaurant manager, is an orphan who has a habit of quoting other people rather than speaking in his own voice. Together, they turn the struggling business into a success, transforming it into a place where people from very different worlds can sit at the same tables. Zaid (Sherif Sabby), a civil servant and one of the restaurant's shareholders, hopes to rebuild his homeland. Tony (Aarif Lee Zhi-ting, in a special appearance), a Chinese American private first class from Los Angeles serving in the U.S. Army, finds an unexpected connection with Xu Fu through food.
That fragile coexistence is precisely what the war destroys. When violence reaches the city, the Dragon Restaurant becomes a refuge for people caught in the fighting. Xu Fu, who initially regards the conflict as someone else's problem, is forced to choose between getting himself out safely and protecting the people who have become his community. Zaid faces a more painful transformation. His first instinct is to protect his family and his fellow citizens, but the destruction around him eventually pushes him into fighting the United States. The film refuses to turn that shift into a simple story of heroism or villainy. War changes what people are willing to do, and the side they end up on does not necessarily tell us who they were before it began.
The film's most disturbing turn comes through Seif (Omar Sherif), an 11-year-old orphan who initially meets Xu Fu while stealing food from the restaurant kitchen and eventually becomes his apprentice. The restaurant gives him something resembling a childhood, but the war offers him something else: a chance to become a fighter. He is drawn toward an armed group whose leader trains children for combat, turning their vulnerability and desire to belong into weapons. The film's treatment of Seif makes its argument about war more devastating than any battlefield sequence could. Violence does not simply kill people; it teaches the next generation to reproduce it.
That seriousness is also where the film's biggest weakness becomes apparent. Shen Teng is best known for comedy, and this film frequently plays to his strengths, finding humor in the restaurant and in Xu Fu's interactions with the people around him. Some of those moments work on their own terms. The problem is that the comedy sometimes collides head-on with the film's darker material. A Chinese restaurant operating in a war zone is an inherently strange premise, but the film occasionally pushes that absurdity so far that the laughter undercuts scenes involving displacement, violence, and children being prepared for war. The contrast could have sharpened the film's point; too often, it blunts it.
Still, the film is most effective when it lets the restaurant itself make the argument. Before the war, food creates a temporary community among people divided by nationality, politics, and circumstance. Once the fighting begins, those divisions become impossible to escape. There is no convenient side to support, because the film is less interested in assigning moral victory than in showing how war turns ordinary people into participants, victims, refugees, and fighters. Its message is familiar, but the restaurant gives that message a human scale, making the destruction of one small community feel like a miniature version of something much larger.
"Once Upon a Time in the Middle East" opens in theaters on October 9, 2026.
