Salam Kahil is totally inappropriate. Even before walking into his Vancouver deli customers are greeted by a page of rules and warnings, the first of which is: “This deli contains coarse language and nudity!” Kahil delivers no less, asking to pimp out especially good-looking customers, and regaling the huddled hungry with tales of his sexual exploits.
It’s a challenge not to view Kahil as merely a telegraph of his own id. His biography is covered in the first 15 minutes – born to a Lebanese family and kicked out of almost every school he attended, Kahil started his wage-earning life as a male escort. Neither coy nor moralizing about his past, he discusses his mixed feelings for his clientele with a bluntness that is a hallmark of all his interactions. His sexuality is frankly addressed as both an outcropping and a feint away from the childhood sexual abuse he endured.
But beyond the sexual pageantry and theatrics, Lewis Bennett’s documentary offers a complicated portrait of a fairly antipathetic subject. And this is the interesting thing about Kahil: He’s just as willing to verbally abuse a customer for not saying the word “please” or to pass out 200 sandwiches to Vancouver’s homeless, as he is comfortable pointing to his own jizz stains on the concrete floor. Making sense of that paradox, and the changing fortunes of the deli and its owner, is the work this documentary attempts to do. And with the exception of its final shot, which makes good on the entirety of the aforementioned warning posted outside the deli, it is a task it largely succeeds in doing.
The Sandwich Nazi
Documentary Competition, World Premiere
Monday, March 16, 1:30pm, Alamo Lamar
Friday, March 20, 11am, Alamo Lamar
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This article appears in March 13 • 2015.