Peace by Chocolate: A Sweet, Light Confection About a Real-Life Refugee Success Story
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-minus
I suppose it’s somewhat on the nose to use the word “sweet” to describe Peace by Chocolate – the true story of a Syrian refugee chocolate maker who restarts in Antigonish, N.S.
But considering the backstory – a bombed-out factory in a warzone, and a family who’s been through god-knows-what – it is surprisingly light, feel-good entertainment, driven by our idealized notion of the welcome-mat Canada puts out for immigrants.
Producer-director Jonathan Keijser’s debut feature is a fish-out-of-water tale that softens the edges in the story in favour of eccentric character comedy and mild family conflict. Oh, and it does a pretty good job of portraying Antigonish as one icy-cold but warm-hearted town.
Issam (Hatem Ali) has a kitchen Eureka! moment in Peace by Chocolate.
The advance scout for his uprooted family, Tareq Hadhad (Ayham Abou Ammar) is a young man with dreams, specifically of becoming a doctor. And for all its drawbacks, Nova Scotia seems a good place to follow that dream, particularly once he meets an Arabic-speaking surgeon named Nadim (Mark Hachem) who can help him through the bureaucratic hurdles.
Maybe a little underhandedly, Tareq convinces his parents back in Syria that he’s found the right place, assuring them that the weather isn’t cold at all.
Though they’re helped out by Canada’s assistance program for refugees, mom Shahnaz (Yara Sabri) and dad Issam (the late filmmaker/actor Hatem Ali in his last performance before his 2020 death in Egypt), soon suffer the boredom and isolation that comes with not speaking the language or understanding the local culture. The one thing Issam knows is chocolate, and his efforts to communicate to the local chocolatier Kelly (Alika Autran) what she’s doing wrong are decidedly unwelcome.
As it happens, you can’t keep a good Willy Wonka down. Issam begins filling time making chocolate at home, and word soon gets around.
With Tareq’s business and translation help, Issam’s Peace by Chocolate (a name that references the family’s journey) is a surprise hit confection, an immigrant success story that soon captures the attention of the news. Unfortunately, Tareq’s New World notions of following his dreams clashes with the Old World expectations of responsibility to your parents and family.
Tareq is invaluable to the chocolates’ continued production, and he doesn’t want to be. (Interesting how similar the plot of this movie is to that of CODA).
As there was in many places where Syrian refugees landed in Canada, there were pockets of unfriendliness. The closest Peace by Chocolate gets to acknowledging same is the initially cool relationship between Issam and Kelly, and an anonymous complaint about health code violations that briefly threatens the enterprise.
The only real drama in the movie is whether Tareq ends up dedicating his life to his family or to medicine. The meat of the film is the varied portrayals of the eccentric locals (Laurent Pitre is particularly likeable as Liam, a local slacker kid who is hired on and goes from walking disaster to seasoned chocolate maker).
There’s an old-style TV-movie quality to all this, that assures a happy ending (it helps that there was a real-life happy-ending to draw from). Like chocolate itself, its empty-calories will at least leave you feeling good.
Peace by Chocolate. Directed by Jonathan Keijser. Starring Ayham Abou Ammar, Hatem Ali and Laurent Pitre. In theatres Friday, May 6.