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<\/p>\n
Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. \u201cIt goes back to Hannah Arendt\u2019s banality of evil a bit,\u201d says director Andrew Neel. \u201cThese everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 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\u2019s most feared dictators and the ever-present dangers that came with the job. Based on the 2020 book<\/a> by the Polish journalist Witold Szab\u0142owski, the 95-minute documentary probes the fraught terrain between morality and survival, asking viewers to consider the choices these chefs made \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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