Local filmmakers behind Sandwich Nazi doc
You are warned at the door of the deli and you are challenged at the start of the film. If you can’t handle course language and pornographic themes, you shouldn’t shop at La Charcuterie and you shouldn’t watch The Sandwich Nazi, the new documentary about the lunchspot’s colourful owner, Salam Kahil.
He is famous around the Lower Mainland for selling epic sandwiches with a side of ribald dialogue and comically abusive behaviour. Kahil makes Seinfeld’s “no soup for you” character look downright aristocratic.
He is also one of the most philanthropic figures in British Columbia, and an unlikely one as well. All these contradictions and conundrums are why primary filmmaker Lewis Bennett and producer/associate director Calum MacLeod spent more than two years recording the details of Kahil’s life, so the world could understand this larger-than-life figure in the Lower Mainland’s food and philanthropy industries.
Other than some opening words from Kahil himself, the first voice in the documentary pulled the elephant in the room right out for everyone to see.
“I remember the first time I saw Salom’s penis,” said loyal deli customer Annette McArthur to the camera. Kahil first told her to google it but she said she wouldn’t, so he pulled his pants down with a shrug and showed her the real thing.
“It was pretty funny,” she continued, establishing why she is still allowed to patronize the sandwich hotspot.
That’s right, he controls the clientele, not the other way around. He doesn’t for one second believe the customer is always right. He doesn’t really care if the customer is ever right, as long as they go along with his personality.
It’s a strong personality, and the cautionary signs on the front door let you know what’s coming should you enter the Surrey establishment. He goes beyond politically incorrect, he goes past lewd.
He’s a former prostitute, born and raised in Lebanon before fleeing the Middle East for a series of other countries before settling in Canada into successful entrepreneurship.
He now sells some of the most amazing sandwiches and fixin’s in Canada – some of them weigh up to four pounds, most of it meat.
But you have to go through his unfiltered personality to get it.
“From the moment you walk in the store, you’re going to get verbally abused,” Steve Bekessy told the camera. “Accept it. You don’t go there for a handshake and a smile. You go there for a slap in the face and ‘when was the last time you ejaculated in the carpet?’”
He grew up a Muslim on a commercial fruit and vegetable farm just outside of Tripoli. He was wise beyond his years, and wished to distance himself from the prevalence of religiousbased violence in the region.
He was also systematically sexually abused throughout his early childhood by a close family member.
So by the time he was a young man he felt nothing for his national borders and he felt no sexual borders either. The money came easily as a male escort, and so did the opportunity to travel the world even if he entered Canada illegally.
The fact he became not only a famous B.C. business person, with close to 30 employees in five locations at his peak, but the fact he was a stalwart philanthropist who donated scads of food, money and time to Vancouver’s less fortunate made him a natural documentary subject, said MacLeod.
MacLeod knows a good screen idea when he sees one. The former Prince George filmmaker was one of the founders and hosts of hit reality TV show Road Hockey Rumble. He was an award-winning senior producer, as well, on the short films Lyon King, Gravity Boy and Our New Toy. As a writer-director, MacLeod’s work has been part of projects like the documentary Asian Gangs, the food show Eat St., and the chainsaw art series Carver Kings.
Bennett was making a number of short films in succession and called on his friend MacLeod to help out with some of them. One of them was a miniature doc on Kahil that caught online fire. More than half a million Reddit viewers clicked on the nine-minute version of Sandwich Nazi and it got into the famed Slamdance Film Festival, telling the filmmakers that they had one on which to expand.
“You get blown away right away by how funny he is, how outrageous he is, and this funny line between his wild personality and his charity work,” said MacLeod. “We got to the bottom of why he is who he is. Certainly his charity work is tied to his life as a refugee, coming from nothing. That’s what turned him to escorting - moving from place to place, desperate to make money, and being endowed with this amazing...ahhh...gift.”
There’s little point trying to couch it: Kahil has a large southern proboscis. (Ok, a little couching.) It isn’t just a story, the camera gets an eyeful of it.
His sandwiches are likewise endowed. And his charity is bigger still. He has donated tens of thousands of sandwiches to the hungry people of the Lower Mainland. And for all his outrageous dialogue and behaviour, he exhibits not a glimmer of naiveté. He has few personal boundaries but a full set of mental faculties, an oratory flare, and when he sees the neglect of the city’s poor it ignites his anger.
“I’ve never seen as much misery anywhere in the world as much I see here in East Van,” he said and admonished people who refuse to help because the sufferers are addicts. “People say ‘oh, they bring it on themselves.’ What a stupid... People say something like this because they’re cheap. They don’t want to make a donation. Some people say ‘oh, I’ll pray for them.’ I don’t believe in prayer. I believe in acts.”
MacLeod couldn’t be happier with the choice of Kahil as a documentary subject, for entertainment reasons but also for social commentary reasons.
“The feature went into the darker corners of why someone would run away from home as a 15-year-old, goes into prostitution, bounces from place to place, just trying to survive,” MacLeod said. “By the end of the film you can see just how much the abuse he suffered as a kid and his family situation put him on his path in life, and where he’s at now is about giving back to people, mobilizing his customers to help feed the hungry in one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Something got lost in production translation, however, and even though Kahil travelled all the way to Texas to share the South By Southwest film festival experience with Bennett and MacLeod, including a screening and panel interview, Kahil is now hostile to the film.
MacLeod said he and Bennett were not only open with Kahil about how the story would be portrayed, but also gave him advance viewings and made changes at his suggestion, so they are dismayed now that he isn’t happy.
But like authentic journalists, they stand behind the social value of the story.
Embodied in Kahil they see a radiant symbol of our own local culture, global culture, and human nature.
“His story is just something else. I’m not easy to make blush or get uncomfortable, but he’s pretty good at it; he can even get me,” said MacLeod. “Its tough to have a documentary out there, about you.”