THE STORY – Five private chefs to fearsome dictators all over the world share their experiences of the kitchens and circumstances that led them to these sometimes dangerous and often morally compromising workplaces.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Andrew Neel (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
Five private chefs. Five of history’s most monstrous regimes. The meals that kept them running. This is the premise of “How to Feed a Dictator.” What director Andrew Neel delivers is something more unsettling than mere culinary curiosity: a film that uses food to excavate the mechanics of how dictatorships form, the complicity behind dictators’ actions, and how core ideologies persist.
Shot across multiple countries and adapted from Witold Szablowski’s book of the same name, the documentary introduces us to the personal chefs of Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Idi Amin (Uganda), Pol Pot (Cambodia), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), and Kim Jong-il (North Korea). Each came to the kitchen through different circumstances, and each found a reason to stay. The film’s central question isn’t really how they got the job, but how they kept cooking despite what was happening around them.
The editing does a tremendous amount of the film’s moral work. Images of violence and oppression cut against those of cooking with the precision of a knife to a filet. Stories of praise from Pinochet’s chef, Jorge “Coco” Pacheco, contrast directly with footage of violence against Chileans. Delicious dishes are presented, and then we lose our appetite from the footage of terror that follows. Neel captures the sensory beauty of cuisine – the warmth of a hardy stew, the crisp cut of a perfectly made pepperoni pizza – with the reverence of a proper food documentary or films like “The Taste of Things,” so that when the archival horror arrives, it lands even harder like a bad stomach ache.
The chefs themselves are a study in what people need to believe to survive. Keo Samoun, who cooked for Pol Pot when she was a young girl, still visits his grave and brings offerings of the foods she once prepared for him. She says she didn’t know about the starvation. As a viewer, you’re not sure if you’re entirely convinced. Ermanno Furlanis, who made Kim Jong-il his beloved pizza, displayed what reads as genuine paranoia about participating in the documentary at all, as if North Korea would come for him if he spoke. When filmmakers confront him with the famine of the 1990s, the years when he was in Pyongyang perfecting Kim’s pizza while people outside were eating leaves and tree bark, he shrugs. He says he didn’t see what was really happening. Again, you don’t entirely know whether to believe it. But it is that blind eye that becomes a recurring theme throughout, a kind of chosen ignorance that keeps these regimes repeating themselves.
The film takes a bit of a shift when it reaches Iraq, where it departs from the chef-and-footage rhythm to meet Hoshyar Ali, a survivor of Hussein’s Kurdish genocide, and he has the missing limbs to prove it. It’s a structural choice that sharpens everything: Hussein’s chef, who uses an alias and is kept in darkness out of fear of Hussein’s enemies, refers to the dictator as the father of Iraq with unshakable admiration. He saw the job as an advantage that brought him safety, gifts, and abundance, while the country suffered. The contrast between Ali and the chef’s perspectives is undeniable.
In Uganda, we meet Otonde Odera, who once lived in considerable wealth as Amin’s chef. Now, he lives in a humble home with bugs crawling along the walls and no teeth to chew the food he still loves to make; he’ll prepare a Spanish omelet with evident pleasure. He became fearful, he says, when he understood what Amin was capable of, perhaps the only chef with that point of view. Odera barely escaped with his life after one of Amin’s children fell ill after a meal. The wealth stopped being worth it.
“How to Feed a Dictator” also makes room to interview others, like Ali, who were unable to avoid the regimes they lived under. A Cambodian torture survivor weeps, recounting electrocution and the family he lost. A Chilean survivor describes electric chairs and women tortured and raped. These testimonies don’t function as counterweights so much as reframes: this is what the sauces were perfected alongside.
The film also includes other interview subjects like journalist Riccardo Orizio, who spent years seeking out and interviewing deposed dictators, and he threads through the film as a kind of philosophical narrator. He reveals that his own grandfather was a Blackshirt under Mussolini, which gives his grappling with collective responsibility a personal weight. “What is the choice for the man in the street?” he asks. It’s one of film’s animating questions, along with the fact that oftentimes authoritarians require you to betray yourself. But author Ruth Ben-Ghiat is less patient when the conversation turns to the chefs, since most of them defend the men they served. “I don’t have any patience for this bullshit,” she says. The blind eye and the propaganda spread continue.
There are many talking head interviews in the film, but not all of them feel necessary. Maimuna Amin, Idi Amin’s daughter, for example, is featured but doesn’t contribute to the discussion of his legacy. He’s just a father she misses. While each regime is explored episodically, some chapters, like this one on Uganda, feel less fully realized because of whom they choose to interview.
However, the cumulative effect is felt heavily. “How to Feed a Dictator” understands that the most chilling thing about these kitchens is the normalcy. The love of food that guided these chefs’ lives, their genuine craft and care, existed simultaneously with atrocity. The film doesn’t resolve that, but it engages the chefs with hard questions on their beliefs and their perspective on the dictators they knew. And while the film provides fantastic insight into how a dictator is made, it’s the responses to the former that make you realize why history repeats itself.
