For more than a century, the Middle East has reached Western cinema audiences through a narrow and familiar lens: the amber filter, the call to prayer laid over a crowded bazaar, and bearded men shouting lines no one bothers to subtitle. As the YouTube channel Wave Media observes in a recent video essay, such figures “are not characters, they’re weather” – the hostile terrain in which a protagonist, usually a heroic but conflicted American soldier or spy, must fight to survive.

A blockbuster Chinese film now asks a subversive question: what happens when the camera treats those locals as people rather than foreign objects in their own land?

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (or Welcome to Dragon Restaurant in Chinese) is directed by Wen Muye, of Dying to Survive fame, and stars Shen Teng as Xu Fu, a debt-laden chef whose restaurant in a fictional Middle Eastern city becomes a sanctuary for civilians and orphans. The war is, in all but name, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Wen drew on the experiences of Chinese restaurateurs in Baghdad such as Chen Xianzhong.

Middle Eastern filmmakers – from Iranian cinema to Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum and Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now – have long depicted their own region with complexity and sensitivity. The novelty here is that a commercial blockbuster from an outside power declines to exoticise the locals as nameless props, villains or victims.

That has been the default mode of American cinema. According to Jack Shaheen, the late scholar and author of the essay, the book and the documentary, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, the vast majority of more than 900 Hollywood films produced between 1896 and 2000 reduced Arabs to sheikhs, terrorists and belly dancers. By his count, only 5 per cent of Arab roles depicted normal human beings.

He wrote that moviemakers “falsely project all Arabs as Muslims and all Muslims as Arabs”. Their distorted lenses have shown Arabs as “brutal, heartless, uncivilised religious fanatics and money-mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorising civilised Westerners, especially Christians and Jews”, or as “abusers of women”.

He compared the stereotype of the hook-nosed Arab with a similar depiction of Jews in Nazi propaganda materials.

This critique extends to post-9/11 cinema. Self-questioning American films such as The Hurt Locker, American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty, Wave Media essayist Jiwon Kim argues, still treat the region as the stage on which Americans endure their moral crises.

“Even the films that question the war, that say it’s more complicated than you think, do so by demanding empathy for the perpetrators,” she says. “And so, we, the audience, are asked to feel the trauma of the soldier who kicked down the door. The people behind the door are still part of the furniture.”Admittedly, there is a moral problem of conflicting perspectives even for genuine artists from an imperialist power. Even the great Albert Camus was criticised for his alleged colonial sympathy against Algerian independence.

Unlike Hollywood, Wen’s film depicts violence not as spectacle but with dread – the chaos of a panicked crowd, the uncertainty of a night in a shelter. Its refrain, hao hao chi fan – eat well – echoes the words of an Iraqi journalist quoted in the video: for those who lived through the war, “sitting down to eat one peaceful meal is in and of itself a luxury”.

The video essay argues that war films generally mirror their nation’s foreign policy grammar. It contrasts Washington’s shifting justifications for the Iraq war with President Xi Jinping’s 2016 speech at the Arab League, in which he declared that “instead of looking for a proxy in the Middle East, we promote peace talks”. Kim admits discomfort with how a Chinese protagonist ultimately rescues Arab children, raising the charge of China casting itself as “the white saviour in beige”. In the end, though, Xu’s only reward is to go home to dinner, and the final image belongs to an orphan, grown up and running his own restaurant.

The South China Morning Post’s film reviewer James Marsh found the film “bombastic”; mainland state media have openly framed it as an expression of Chinese diplomatic values. Beijing’s professed policy of non-interference contrasts with America’s long history of war and destruction in the name of spreading democracy and freedom.

Unicef estimates that more than 473 million children – over one in six worldwide – live in conflict or war zones.

Whether a story comes from Hollywood, China or anywhere else, the moral test should be: are the people on screen granted interiority and agency? That a Chinese film feels refreshing says much about the diet Western audiences have been fed.