A Chinese film about an Iraqi war, a restaurant, and one reluctant chef offers something increasingly rare in war cinema: a story in which ordinary people—not nations—are the protagonists
There is something almost audacious about making an Iraq War film through the eyes of a Chinese chef.
No American general.
No CIA operative.
No heroic Marine.
No Iraqi politician.
No grand strategy room in Washington.
Instead, there is a restaurant.
A cook trying to make money.
A businessman trying to survive.
A country falling apart around them.
And eventually, children caught inside a war they never chose.
That is the premise of Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (欢迎来龙餐馆), the Chinese drama-war film directed by Wen Muye and starring Shen Teng as Xu Fu and Jiang Qiming as Ma Junsheng. Chinese film databases classify it as a drama, war and comedy, while its official synopsis describes Xu Fu travelling to a Middle Eastern capital to work as a Chinese restaurant chef just as war erupts.
The film is particularly intriguing because it approaches the Iraq War from a perspective Hollywood rarely uses.
Not from the people who started the war.
From someone who simply happened to be there.
And that difference changes everything.
The war begins—and Xu Fu wants to leave
Xu Fu does not arrive in Iraq as an ideological warrior.
He is there to work.
He wants to earn money, support his family and pay his debts.
His life revolves around the restaurant.
That is important because it strips away the mythology that surrounds war.
For governments, wars begin with speeches.
For ordinary people, they often begin with cancelled plans.
A flight that suddenly becomes impossible.
A supermarket that stops receiving supplies.
A neighbourhood that becomes dangerous.
A friend who disappears.
A familiar street that becomes a battlefield.
Xu Fu has already bought his ticket home when the conflict erupts.
His instinct is completely understandable:
Leave.
But his employer and friend, Zaid, persuades him to stay.
The restaurant begins supplying food to a safe zone.
Money becomes the reason for remaining.
And gradually, survival becomes entanglement.
The official Chinese synopsis describes precisely this trajectory: Xu Fu initially seeks to profit through his intelligence and hard work, before the brutality of war transforms his circumstances and eventually pushes him toward protecting children.
That transformation is the heart of the film.
The genius of making the protagonist an outsider
Xu Fu is Chinese.
That gives the filmmakers an unusual narrative advantage.
He is not directly responsible for the American invasion.
He is not an Iraqi political actor.
He is not a member of the insurgency.
He does not arrive carrying a political ideology.
He is an outsider who nevertheless becomes trapped inside the consequences of somebody else's political decisions.
That makes him a useful cinematic proxy for the audience.
He initially looks at the conflict from the outside.
Then the outside disappears.
This is one of the oldest truths about war:
There is almost no such thing as remaining neutral once violence becomes sufficiently pervasive.
You can avoid choosing a side.
You cannot necessarily avoid being affected by the consequences.
The restaurant becomes a miniature Iraq
The Dragon Restaurant is more than a setting.
It is the film's central metaphor.
Inside it, people eat.
They work.
They negotiate.
They laugh.
They make money.
They form relationships.
Outside it, the country is collapsing.
The restaurant therefore becomes a miniature version of the world the characters want to preserve.
Normality.
Routine.
Commerce.
Food.
Human conversation.
And then war keeps breaking through the doors.
That is what makes the premise so powerful.
A restaurant is almost aggressively ordinary.
War is not.
Putting the two together makes the violence more disturbing.
This is not really a film about soldiers
That may be its greatest strength.
The conventional war film usually places military personnel at the centre.
The audience receives the conflict through weapons, tactics, missions and battles.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East instead asks:
What does war do to people who never volunteered to participate in it?
That includes restaurant workers.
Business owners.
Civilians.
Children.
Foreign workers.
American soldiers.
Insurgents.
And people who simply want to go home.
The film's perspective therefore moves the Iraq War away from Washington and Baghdad's political elites and into the spaces where ordinary life takes place.
That is where war becomes intimate.
America is responsible—but Americans are not reduced to monsters
This is one of the most interesting aspects of the film described by its premise and available production material.
The movie does not need to pretend that the Iraq War was morally neutral.
The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The Bush administration justified the invasion primarily through claims involving weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime.
The weapons of mass destruction that formed a central part of the justification were not found.
The war nevertheless happened.
The occupation followed.
And the consequences were catastrophic.
But a film can acknowledge responsibility for a war without turning every American into a villain.
That distinction is important.
According to the film's storyline, Xu Fu eventually develops relationships with American soldiers who become customers and supporters of his restaurant.
They too are caught inside the machinery of a war larger than themselves.
That is a far more interesting depiction than the familiar Hollywood binary.
American = villain.
Iraqi = victim.
Or the reverse.
Instead, the film asks us to recognise something uncomfortable:
A soldier can participate in an unjust war and still be a human being trapped inside it.
The Iraq War was not experienced equally
This is one of the historical realities that war cinema often struggles to convey.
The people who make the decision to invade are usually separated from the people who experience the invasion.
Presidents do not sleep under bombardment.
Generals do not necessarily bury their children.
Foreign ministers do not queue for electricity.
Restaurant workers do not write the strategic doctrine.
Children certainly do not vote on military intervention.
The distance between decision-makers and victims is therefore fundamental to understanding war.
The film appears to exploit that distance.
Xu Fu is not sitting in Washington debating whether the invasion is justified.
He is trying to run a kitchen.
And yet the decision made thousands of miles away eventually determines almost every aspect of his life.
The transformation of Zaid
The character of Zaid provides another important dimension.
He begins as an official connected to Iraq's water and electricity administration.
He is part of the functioning state.
He has a job.
He has relationships.
He represents the possibility of normal life continuing.
Then the war destroys his family.
His position changes.
He becomes an insurgent.
That transformation is critical.
It asks a question that war films often avoid:
Where does an insurgency come from?
It is tempting to treat insurgents as people who simply wake up one morning and decide to become terrorists.
But political violence often emerges from accumulated experiences:
Loss.
Occupation.
Humiliation.
Fear.
Revenge.
Collapse of institutions.
Destruction of communities.
That does not make every act committed by an insurgent morally justified.
But it makes the phenomenon understandable.
And understanding is not the same as excusing.
The prison changes everything
Xu Fu's story becomes progressively darker when he is detained by American forces because of his relationship with Zaid.
This is another important reversal.
The Chinese chef who initially wanted nothing to do with the war becomes suspected because of his association with someone who has joined the insurgency.
Then the insurgency attacks the American prison.
Xu Fu is caught between two sides.
He is no longer simply an observer.
He has become a person both sides have reason to distrust.
That is the nightmare of war:
Your innocence does not necessarily protect you.
Association becomes evidence.
Proximity becomes guilt.
Survival becomes suspicious.
And ordinary relationships become liabilities.
Then the film reaches its most devastating idea
The story eventually turns toward children.
Xu Fu becomes involved in protecting orphans from being recruited as child bombers.
At that point, the war's political arguments become almost irrelevant.
Whatever one thinks about the invasion.
Whatever one thinks about the insurgency.
Whatever one thinks about American foreign policy.
Whatever one thinks about Iraqi politics.
There is one question that becomes impossible to escape:
What has happened to children when adults have turned their country into a battlefield?
The children did not invade Iraq.
They did not overthrow Saddam Hussein.
They did not formulate American foreign policy.
They did not organise the insurgency.
They inherited the consequences.
And that may be the film's deepest political statement.
War turns children into weapons
This is one of the darkest realities of modern conflict.
Once institutions collapse, children become vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups.
Their vulnerability can be exploited.
Their desperation can be manipulated.
Their orphanhood can be weaponised.
The transformation of a child into a weapon represents the complete destruction of the boundary between civilian life and warfare.
And it reveals the ultimate failure of adults.
The adults who started the war.
The adults who continued it.
The adults who profited from it.
The adults who turned political grievances into armed movements.
The children simply inherit the wreckage.
Why the film's Chinese perspective matters
The film is not American.
It is not British.
It is not Iraqi.
It comes from China.
That matters enormously.
For decades, the global visual language of war has been heavily shaped by Hollywood.
American cinema has produced countless films about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts.
Even when those films are critical of American policy, they frequently remain structured around American characters.
The audience sees the war through American eyes.
China's film industry is now producing an alternative perspective.
That does not automatically make it more objective.
Chinese cinema has its own political and ideological environment.
But it does introduce a different vantage point.
The protagonist is neither an American soldier nor an Iraqi political leader.
He is a Chinese migrant worker.
That creates an unusual triangular perspective:
China watching America at war in the Middle East through an ordinary Chinese man.
The film's Chinese identity is itself politically interesting
There is an unavoidable geopolitical context.
China has become increasingly important in the Middle East.
It is a major trading partner for regional countries.
It has expanded diplomatic relationships across the region.
It has positioned itself as an alternative diplomatic actor.
And it has repeatedly criticised American military interventionism.
A Chinese film depicting the Iraq War therefore inevitably enters a larger conversation about competing models of international power.
But the film's strength appears to come from not making that argument too loudly.
Instead of giving the audience a lecture about American imperialism, it puts a Chinese chef in a restaurant.
That is smarter storytelling.
The title itself is revealing
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.
There is something almost fairy-tale-like about the title.
“Once upon a time” normally introduces a story from the distant past.
But Iraq's war is not ancient history.
Its consequences remain visible.
Millions of people were displaced.
Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost across the broader conflict, depending on methodology and timeframe.
The political consequences reshaped the Middle East.
The rise of sectarian violence contributed to the environment in which ISIS later emerged.
The invasion altered regional power relationships.
And the psychological consequences remain embedded in a generation.
Calling the story “once upon a time” therefore creates a strange effect.
It sounds like a fairy tale.
But what follows is a nightmare.
The film also refuses an easy anti-Americanism
This may be its most mature quality.
A simplistic anti-American film would portray American soldiers as monsters.
A simplistic pro-American film would portray them as liberators.
This story appears interested in neither.
The American soldiers who become connected to Xu Fu are human beings.
They eat.
They laugh.
They become customers.
They form relationships.
They are themselves caught inside the war.
That does not erase the structural responsibility of the country that invaded Iraq.
It separates systems from individuals.
That distinction is essential.
A government can make a catastrophic decision.
The people sent to implement that decision can still possess humanity.
Both things can be true simultaneously.
And the Iraqis are not romanticised either
The film apparently refuses to turn the insurgency into a noble resistance movement.
Zaid's transformation is tragic rather than triumphant.
The insurgents are capable of violence.
Children are recruited.
People are detained.
Fear becomes ubiquitous.
That prevents the story from becoming another ideological morality play.
The film's position appears to be:
War destroys moral clarity faster than it creates it.
People become both victims and perpetrators.
Sometimes simultaneously.
This is what Hollywood often struggles with
Hollywood has produced excellent Iraq War films.
The Hurt Locker.
Green Zone.
American Sniper.
The Messenger.
In the Valley of Elah.
Stop-Loss.
Many of these films are deeply critical of war.
But the industry's narrative machinery often remains tied to familiar structures.
Soldier.
Mission.
Enemy.
Trauma.
Homecoming.
Redemption.
The Iraqi civilian frequently remains secondary.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East appears to reverse that architecture.
The war is not the protagonist.
The consequences of war are.
The restaurant is more important than the battlefield
This is perhaps why the film's premise feels so refreshing.
The most meaningful scenes in a war film do not necessarily have to involve combat.
Sometimes the most powerful image is a person preparing food while explosions occur outside.
Someone trying to keep a business open.
A family eating.
A child playing.
A man waiting for a phone call.
A person looking at an airport ticket that has suddenly become useless.
These moments communicate what war actually destroys:
normality.
A battlefield is where armies fight.
A home is where life is destroyed.
There is no clean ending to war
The film's trajectory—from restaurant worker to prisoner to protector of children—captures an important reality.
People do not necessarily become heroes because they want to.
Sometimes history forces them into moral decisions.
Xu Fu begins as someone motivated by money.
Then survival.
Then loyalty.
Then responsibility.
His transformation does not make him a conventional action hero.
It makes him a person who gradually discovers that neutrality is impossible when vulnerable people are being destroyed around him.
That is much more compelling.
Why this film may resonate beyond China
The Iraq War generation is old enough now to look back.
The teenagers who watched the invasion in 2003 are adults.
The children born during the occupation are now young adults.
The soldiers who fought there are middle-aged.
The journalists who covered it are older.
And the political generation that supported the invasion has largely moved on.
But the war remains.
That makes a film about an ordinary person caught inside it particularly relevant.
It is not really asking:
Was the invasion justified?
That argument has been made for two decades.
It is asking:
What happens to human beings after the argument is over?
The quietness is the politics
There is something powerful about refusing to lecture.
A filmmaker can tell you that war is evil.
Or they can show you a restaurant worker who cannot get home.
They can tell you occupation destroys societies.
Or they can show you a man imprisoned because of whom he knows.
They can tell you children suffer.
Or they can show you orphans being turned into weapons.
The second approach is more powerful because the audience reaches the conclusion itself.
That is cinematic maturity.
The film also complicates the idea of neutrality
Xu Fu's original plan is essentially:
This is not my war.
That is an understandable position.
But wars rarely respect such boundaries.
If the restaurant supplies food to one side, it becomes politically relevant.
If the owner knows an insurgent, he becomes suspicious.
If American soldiers patronise the restaurant, that relationship becomes meaningful.
If insurgents attack a prison, civilians are caught in the consequences.
If children are recruited, protecting them becomes a political act whether Xu Fu wants it to be or not.
The film therefore appears to make a profound argument:
You can refuse to choose a side, but history can still choose you.
China is telling a different Iraq story
There is also something historically significant about the fact that this story is emerging from China.
For much of the post-9/11 era, the global conversation about Iraq was dominated by American and European media.
China watched.
It criticised the invasion.
It expanded its economic relationships in the Middle East.
Now Chinese filmmakers are beginning to construct cultural narratives about the consequences of American military intervention.
That does not automatically make Chinese cinema neutral.
But it does mean the global cinematic conversation is becoming more multipolar.
Hollywood no longer possesses an exclusive monopoly over the stories through which global audiences understand war.
The most important character may be the audience
The film's real achievement may be that it does not tell viewers whom to hate.
That is increasingly unusual.
Modern political media is designed around outrage.
Pick a side.
Identify the villain.
Find the hero.
Repeat the story.
War cinema can easily fall into the same trap.
But if the film genuinely follows its premise to its conclusion, then the audience is left with something much more uncomfortable:
An American soldier can be a victim.
An Iraqi insurgent can be a victim and perpetrator.
A Chinese migrant can become a hero despite initially caring only about himself.
Children can become victims of everyone.
And political leaders can start wars whose consequences they will never personally experience.
That is not moral relativism.
It is moral complexity.
Why the film's timing matters
The world has entered another period of geopolitical fragmentation.
The Iraq War once appeared to mark the triumph of American military power.
Two decades later, that assumption looks considerably less certain.
China has become a global economic and diplomatic competitor.
Russia has challenged Western power.
The Middle East has become increasingly multipolar.
And countries across the Global South are questioning the assumptions that dominated international politics after the Cold War.
A Chinese film looking backward at Iraq therefore inevitably speaks to the present.
It asks what happens when great powers decide they have the right to remake other countries.
And it asks who pays the price.
The greatest indictment of war is not death
It is what happens to life before death arrives.
People stop trusting strangers.
Children stop going to school.
Businesses disappear.
Families separate.
Friends become enemies.
Ordinary people become suspects.
Soldiers become traumatised.
Insurgents become radicalised.
And the boundary between victim and perpetrator becomes increasingly difficult to see.
That is the world Once Upon a Time in the Middle East appears determined to explore.
Not war as spectacle.
War as contamination.
A film about Iraq that is ultimately about humanity
That may explain why the film can be critical of the American invasion without becoming anti-American.
Its true enemy is not an ethnicity.
Not a nationality.
Not a religion.
Not even a particular army.
Its enemy is the machinery that turns political decisions into human suffering.
That is a much more universal argument.
It allows the film to condemn the invasion while still allowing American soldiers to possess humanity.
It allows the film to show Iraqi insurgents committing atrocities without denying the conditions that produced them.
It allows Xu Fu to begin as a selfish survivor and become someone willing to risk everything for children.
And it allows the audience to experience war not as a political thesis but as a gradual destruction of ordinary life.
The film we may need now
The most powerful war films do not necessarily make us hate the enemy.
They make us hate the circumstances that require enemies.
That is what makes this film potentially important.
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is not simply a Chinese movie about Iraq.
It is a movie about what happens when ordinary people become trapped inside decisions made by people far more powerful than them.
Its protagonist does not begin with a political manifesto.
He begins with a plane ticket home.
Then the war takes the plane away.
Then it takes his neutrality.
Then his safety.
Then his freedom.
And eventually it forces him to decide what kind of person he is willing to become.
That is why the film's central idea is so devastating.
War does not ask whether you wanted to participate.
It simply arrives.
And once it does, it begins consuming the boundaries that separate soldier from civilian, foreigner from local, victim from perpetrator, and observer from participant.
Perhaps that is why a Chinese chef is such an unexpectedly powerful guide through the Iraq War.
He has no grand political theory.
He just wants to go home.
And that is precisely what makes the story universal.
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