How to Feed a Dictator

FOOD / The elderly personal chefs of five strongmen expose the uneasy bond between cuisine, loyalty, and violence. Andrew Neel’s Tribeca and Sheffield Doc/Fest-debuting How to Feed a Dictator, shot across seven countries, teases out the stories of the now elderly personal chefs to Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il while they recreate the strongmen’s favourite dishes, the final creations framed as if in a culinary magazine. These contemporary images are then juxtaposed with archival footage, along with sit-downs with journalists, academics, and even several victims of the regimes who link food itself to extractive power (as crucial as guns, according to political science prof Bruce Beuno de Mesquita). This allows a sensational premise to ultimately become something much more satisfying, a thorny exploration of the line between banal complicity and circumstantial desperation.

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