Covering a film festival is more like ordering à la carte than at a buffet—you can’t sample everything, and all you have to go by in making your choices is the festival guide’s indiscriminately appetizing blurbs. That leads to some bad surprises—such as Vietnam’s inane crime thriller Clash, which intrigued me with its description of “hyperbolic shootouts” but had me running out of my seat like bad Pho—and some quite good ones. An example of the latter is Fatih Akim’s Soul Kitchen, a light but finely prepared confection about tribulations of a Hamburger—as in a resident of the northern German city—with too many pots on the stove. On top of the challenges facing every struggling young restaurateur—irritable chef, health department sticklers, pitiless tax collectors, and a faulty dishwasher—Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos, who co-wrote the movie) has to deal with a mooching ex-con brother, a predatory developer, a disintegrating relationship, and, as garnish, a herniated disk. (From lifting the dishwasher.)

The film is about food to the extent that Cheers is about alcohol, which is to say tangentially. But food is central to the scene that sold the movie for me, in which the gruff, diva-ish chef (an unshaven Birol Ünel) demonstrates the importance of ingenious plating, classing up Soul Kitchen’s greasy-spoon menu—and jacking up its prices—without buying new ingredients. Frozen fish sticks are freed from their breading and laid gingerly over a tiny bed of boiled spinach. Two french fries are crushed and rolled into a perfectly swirled dollop of mash. Ketchup and mayo are mixed together and drizzled in a spiral across the dish. Voilà, from 8 to 40 Euros. See Soul Kitchen before it gets reheated in a inevitable, bland Hollywood remake, the way the last great German food movie, 2001’s Bella Martha, was turned into the insipid Aaron Eckhart vehicle No Reservations.