"Peace By Chocolate" isn't just the name of the movie, it's also the name of the actual chocolate company founded by Syrian immigrants in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. The movie focuses on father Issam (Hatem Ali) and son Tareq (Ayham Abou Ammar), fleeing the Syrian civil war with their family. Tareq (who speaks good English) comes over first and gets a typical Canadian welcome, stepping out of the airport into a Canadian snow storm. When his father and mother join him, his father resumes his old work of making chocolates - despite speaking no English. The third-largest role goes to Frank (Mark Camacho), a local who does everything he can to help the family out.

I found the father and son surprisingly unsympathetic: Tareq was desperate to complete his medical degree to become a doctor, which I sympathized with. But he wanted to do that immediately, to the point of abandoning his family in the middle of Antigonish (population 4,500). I agreed with Issam that Tareq should stick around for a while - but I felt that Issam showed zero sympathy for Tareq's desire, or even recognition that it would be good for the family. Of course as movie viewers we have no idea what the actual family dynamic was - we see a condensation of a couple years in an hour and a half. It works out reasonably well (or so the movie claims), but when the most sympathetic character is the third-most important character in the movie and not one of the refugees that the movie is nominally about ... It's not a bad movie, but I was expecting "a heart-warming story" and I felt the movie faltered fairly badly on that front.