It's Sporklie Time! (Un-American Edition)

Alright, it's time to hand out another mildly highly sought-after Sporklie. This time, let's show some love for those poor, poor films that aren't fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with Michael Bay, be funded by the Weinstein Brothers, or utilize the undervalued Method skills of Charlie Sheen or Tara Reid. And so I present you/je vous présente/ich stelle dich vor/I представи ви (Bulgarian, duh) with the winner of the Sporklie for Best Foreign Film....AFTER THE JUMP, of course!

Still with me? Okay, the snubbed foreign film this year is Germany's Soul Kitchen, a delightfully (I hate that word, sorry, but there was no apt adverb to replace it this time) warm little comedy set in Hamburg from Turkish-German director Fatih Akin.

Akin's past films focus on the Turkish community in Germany, whether in the Babel-esque "isn't the world a small place?" vignettes of 2007's The Edge of Heaven, or the harrowing story of a recovering drug addict and his epic romance with a Turkish immigrant in Head-On (2004). We'll just pretend he never directed the mess that was 2008's New York, I Love You.

Soul Kitchen is both lighter and sprier than Akin's previous works, and eschews German-Turkish culture for the Greek-German foodie culture of Hamburg (yes, now you know that exists). The film follows Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos), the owner of Soul Kitchen, a run-down and down-on-its-luck restaurant inside a giant warehouse in working-class Hamburg. A series of hijinks both too complicated and unimportant to discuss here lead Zinos to hire Shayn Weiss (Birol Uenel), a passionate but temperamental (and recently fired) chef to help turn the restaurant around. The plot plays second fiddle to (again, for lack of a better word) the insanely fun vibe that Akin manages to evoke. You want food porn? It's here. You want a cranky old wisdom-spouting sailor named Sokrates? Akin's got you covered. And you want a dinner-party-turned-orgy that's so positively orgiastic it puts Eyes Wide Shut to shame? Look no further.

Also, it's just a really, really awesome movie. So check. It out.

This is how the beginning of an orgy in a Greek-German restaurant looks, for future reference