An in-depth feature and review of Wen Muye’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East
I. An Unexpected Departure
This summer, a film that most audiences assumed would be another Shen Teng comedy has become one of the most talked-about Chinese releases of the season. Directed by Wen Muye and produced by Ning Hao, starring Shen Teng and Jiang Qiming, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East held advance screenings from August 8–10, drawing rare 9.8/10 pre-release scores on both Maoyan and Taopiaopiao — the highest advance-screening ratings for a domestic film in three years. Following its official release on August 11, the film opened at 8.4 on Douban and crossed RMB 300 million at the box office within its first two days.
But the numbers are less remarkable than the story the film chose to tell: a Chinese chef, in a Middle Eastern city under the shadow of the 2003 Iraq War, holds a group of children safe through a small Chinese restaurant while the fighting closes in around him.
II. From Real Life to the Screen: Xu Fu and the “Iraq Fried Rice” Story
The film’s protagonist, Xu Fu (played by Shen Teng), is loosely drawn from the real experiences of a Chinese chef who once ran a restaurant in wartime Iraq — a figure who became known online as the “Iraq fried rice guy.” Xu Fu travels overseas to work off his debts at Long (Dragon) Restaurant, where he meets front-of-house manager Ma Junsheng (Jiang Qiming). The two build the restaurant’s reputation on authentic Chinese cooking, until war breaks out and no one around them is left unaffected.
Wen Muye — best known internationally for his acclaimed social drama Dying to Survive — again resists the urge to build a flawless hero. Xu Fu is not a saint: he goes abroad for money, cuts corners, hedges his bets, and operates in moral gray zones. But when the safety of the neighborhood’s children comes down to a single decision, decency wins out. That imperfect, hard-won goodness is what critics point to when describing audiences as laughing their way into the cinema and leaving in tears.
III. Review: A Comedy Star’s Anti-War Realist Turn
Rating: 4.2/5
Performance: Shen Teng’s De-Comedic Moment
For audiences accustomed to Shen Teng’s holiday-comedy timing, the film delivers a genuine mismatch of expectations — some viewers who came for laughs found the film heavier than anticipated, and openly said so. That very mismatch, however, is what makes the performance land: Shen Teng abandons his signature comic rhythm in favor of restrained, weighty emotional work, drawing comparisons to award-caliber dramatic performances despite his having never won a major domestic acting prize. Jiang Qiming’s Ma Junsheng is an equally strong presence — an unbroken opening take that moves fluidly across three languages establishes the character’s outsider status early, and the two actors’ scenes together are the film’s most tender passages. The young Egyptian actor playing the local boy Saif is another highlight.
Theme: Food as the Measure of War
The film’s smartest choice is refusing to turn “food heals war” into feel-good sentimentality. Instead, it makes clear that under bombardment, simply sitting down to a stable meal becomes a luxury. The approach echoes Dying to Survive, which used the struggle to buy medicine as a lens onto China’s healthcare system — here, Wen Muye again uses the most ordinary of acts, eating, to build an emotional bridge between the audience and people living through war. The recurring line “eat properly” has been widely cited by critics as the film’s emotional center of gravity: understated, but carrying real weight.
Points of Divide: A Mismatch of Genre Expectations
The film’s reception isn’t without friction — but it’s worth being precise about what kind of friction it is. This is not a quality dispute; it’s a genre-expectation mismatch. Viewers who rated the film four or five stars overwhelmingly praised Shen Teng’s dramatic breakthrough; more lukewarm reviews tend to come from audiences who arrived expecting comedy and encountered a serious war drama instead. In other words, the friction isn’t really about the film — it’s about a gap between what the marketing promised and what audiences got, which is also where the film’s real structural weakness lies.
IV. A Broader Reading: China’s Shifting Narrative on the Middle East
If The Wandering Earth marked the moment Chinese sci-fi let Chinese engineers, rather than American soldiers, save the planet, Once Upon a Time in the Middle East attempts the same directional shift in a genre long monopolized by Hollywood framing: stories about the Middle East itself. That’s the context behind the film being described internationally as the first Chinese commercial film to center the everyday lives of ordinary people in the region.
Its posture is a deliberate inversion. The protagonist isn’t a soldier, a spy, or a superpowered savior — he’s a cook. His heroism amounts to keeping a door open and children fed while a war he didn’t start burns outside. In this telling, the Middle East isn’t a source of menace; it’s a place where children live, where a small restaurant can matter, where ordinary decency is worth protecting — even when that decency happens to be Chinese.
For readers tracking China’s outbound content strategy, this shift is a meaningful data point: Chinese commercial cinema is beginning to engage global conversations about the Middle East on non-adversarial terms, rather than either mimicking or directly countering the Hollywood war-film template.
V. The Industry Story: A Word-of-Mouth Hit Undercut by Its Own Rollout
The film also illustrates a familiar distribution problem. Official confirmation of the release date came only six days before the August 11 opening, compressing the advance-screening window to almost nothing and effectively eliminating the long-lead marketing cycle — trailer rollouts, cast tours, short-video seeding — that major domestic releases typically rely on. Despite the standout pre-release scores, opening-day screening share sat at roughly 16%, well below what the word-of-mouth would suggest. A title that doesn’t travel easily, a subject matter that feels geographically distant to domestic audiences accustomed to stories set closer to home, and the arrival of Christopher Nolan’s next release on August 14 — which is expected to draw premium-format screens away — all remain live variables in whether this critical success converts into a longer box-office run.
VI. Closing Note
Once Upon a Time in the Middle East isn’t, in the end, a straightforward war film, nor is it a conventional Shen Teng comedy. It’s a narrative experiment about how ordinary people hold onto a small measure of dignity inside a war they never chose. It uses a dinner table to say something much larger — and that, more than its box-office trajectory, is why the film is worth watching closely.
This piece was compiled from public reporting, Douban/Maoyan/Taopiaopiao rating data, and Chinese media commentary, for EntertainLens editorial reference.
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