Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (2026)

Nobody Wins a War

An excellent anti-war film, in the way that perhaps only people who weren't directly involved in it could have made it. And you can see this even through the journey of our two main characters, Xu Fu, a Chinese chef hired to work at a Chinese restaurant in Iraq in 2002, and Ma JunSheng, another Chinese man who was already working there as a sort of manager and also serves as their Arabic and English translator.

The film can basically be divided into:
Running the restaurant before and during the war, the American invasion and destruction and its aftermath, and eventually becoming prisoners, first of the Americans and later of Iraqi insurgents.

Without falling into the black-and-white approach of Hollywood war movies, the film shows the invasion for what it was, basically a brutal conquest, without the usual bullshit of excessive sympathy for soldiers who are in another country to kill, as they themselves put it and have continued to justify to this day: they're all "terrorists." And we follow people who aren't, while seeing through the events and their dynamics how people are pushed into becoming labeled that way, even though the label itself can change depending on the interests of whoever is applying it. For the people being invaded, the terrorists would be the others.

At the same time, the film doesn't romanticize the resistance either. It shows all the brutality and the way innocent people and victims, children and adults alike, are exploited as cannon fodder, ready to be indoctrinated and follow orders from above against the people who killed their entire families.

And it's incredible how, starting with a chef working in a conflict zone, the film opens up such a wide range of ideas and perspectives about the wars we've followed through the news and seen portrayed in so many films about traumatized soldiers, that tired, cheesy and barely convincing cliché when you understand what these productions are actually trying to accomplish. Here, there's a rare level of finesse and delicacy in the way all of this is handled, making the whole experience hit much harder than you'd expect from its premise.

Watch it however you can, because this absolutely has everything that makes a great film worth watching.

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