The story of 'Salami Aleikum' deals with the vegetarian son of an Iranian butcher who is forced to adopt the family enterprise in the German city of Cologne in spite of his pangs of conscience. In order to overcome these, he spirits himself away into Bollywood fantasies of love songs and devotes himself to knitting a never-ending scarf. Fooled by a Polish conman, he winds up buying a flock of BSE-infected sheep in Poland, but suffers an accident in a garage on the way there. Assisted by the garage's female mechanic, a former East German shot-put Olympic hope disgraced after the reunification for taking steroids, he winds up falling in love with her, a relationship frowned upon her family until her father mistakes the butcher's son for a wool importer, targeting him for investing in the town's long defunct textile factory...
Yes, that's a lot of story heaved upon the viewer, and it's constantly being added to as well, with quirky remarks, jokes about inter-cultural communication, animated fantasy sequences etcetera etcetera, and a lot of this will be lost to a non-German viewer. Still, this film has absolutely magical moments, like when the parents of the lead's love interest deliver pretty international justifications for their xenophobia (like 9/11), only to change their tune 180 degrees once they suspect that there's money to be earned. At its best, 'Salami Aleikum' evokes memories of Tati or Kusturica, like when the Iranian and East German fathers compare the uniforms of their now defunct homelands and compliment each other as to how dashing they look. Considering that this is a German film, and that German films are almost always somber, sullen and dreadful to watch, such imagery is priceless.
If 'Salami Aleikum' is not perfect, then because it suffers from the typical malaise of a debut feature: trying to be too many things at once. But helmer Ali Samadi Ahadi, who previously co-directed the excellent and sensitive child soldier documentary 'Lost Children', is definitely working on a visual language of his own.
