How to Feed a Dictator
Key takeaways
- A still from How to Feed a Dictator Photograph: Tribeca Film Festival View image in fullscreen.
- Andrew Lawrence Tue 9 Jun 2026 11.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 15 Jun 2026 10.45 BSTShare Prefer the Guardian on GoogleKim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza.
- Structurally, the film is something of a tasting menu, serving up sobering morsels of human atrocity within the trappings of a decadent cooking show.
A still from How to Feed a Dictator Photograph: Tribeca Film Festival View image in fullscreen. A still from How to Feed a Dictator Photograph: Tribeca Film Festival Documentary films‘A man of great appetites’: what’s it like to be a dictator’s personal chef?In an often chilling new documentary, the chefs of brutal leaders from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, talk about their unusual lives behind the scenes
Andrew Lawrence Tue 9 Jun 2026 11.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 15 Jun 2026 10.45 BSTShare Prefer the Guardian on GoogleKim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn’t resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin reportedly had the capacity for an entire roasted goat. The menus may have differed, but the appetite was the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”
Read moreIn his latest film, How to Feed a Dictator, which premieres at the Tribeca film festival this week, five private chefs recount their intimate experiences serving some of the world’s most feared dictators and the ever-present dangers that came with the job. Based on the 2020 book by the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, the 95-minute documentary probes the fraught terrain between morality and survival, asking viewers to consider the choices these chefs made – and the choices they never really had. Structurally, the film is something of a tasting menu, serving up sobering morsels of human atrocity within the trappings of a decadent cooking show. It makes for especially uneasy viewing on an empty stomach.