Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein he couldn’t resist the grilled fish. Idi Amin says he had a roasted goat. The menus may be different, but the passion is the same. For history’s most famous strongmen, the dining room table doubled as a power stage. For the chefs who put them together, each dish came with a unique twist. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s prohibition of evil,” says director Andrew Neel. “Everyday things that we love, like food, can be very different in times of cruelty.”
In his latest film, How to Feed a Dictator, which opens at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, five secret chefs share their experiences serving some of the world’s most powerful dictators and the dangers that come with the job. Adoption 2020 book Written by Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, the 95-minute documentary explores the dilemmas between morality and life, asking viewers to consider the choices these chefs made – and the choices they didn’t. Visually, the film is a delicious meal, which adds to the brutality of the people within the cooking show. It makes you look less attractive on an empty stomach.
Like the menu on offer, opinions vary widely. We meet Keo Samoun at the brutal grave of his former boss, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, spreading fish, fruit and rice to a man he still regards as a god. The famous pizzaiolo Ermanno Furlanis, in contrast, remembers the fear of making pies Kim Jong Il – his life under surveillance, his passport protected, the government apparatchik who went into his kitchen to make sure that the pizza on one pizza was so far apart.
No chef is struggling with their craft like Uganda’s Charles Otonde Odera. He describes his early days working for Ugandan dictator Idi Amin as a life-changing experience – a poor villager walking one day, and the next driving a Mercedes, helping eight women, living in incredible comfort while Amin threatened and abused the villagers. For all chefs, comfort was a trade-off. In many ways, that was a gig – a mindset that could forgive anything. Neel said: “Saddam’s chefs get a car every year. “The words, ‘it was a good gig,’ I think, run the world. Like, ‘It was just business.’
It wasn’t until Amin’s second wife, Kay, was he was found dead in the caramid rumors that he had killed her for taking a girlfriend, Odera began to reconsider the deal. “I missed my minimum wage a long time ago,” says the doc. “My heart was at peace.”
Odera described Amin as “a gluttonous man” who seemed to relish the way in which the idea of cannibalism angered Ugandans associated with Britain, promoting the image of a ruler who transcended both or self-restraint. (Amin rejected the suggestion, insisting that human flesh is “very salty”.) Odera recalls being ordered to cook a human’s heart, and Amin telling him that eating a human’s heart prevents its spirit from haunting you. His career also changed when one of Amin’s children became ill after eating, an innocent incident that led to the cook’s death.
While Odera is explaining these sad things, he is preparing a roast goat with a group of cooks. In the book How to Feed a Dictator, images of animal slaughter and state-sanctioned violence are deliberately included. One can only imagine the discomfort of the crew filming this epic meal, caught between the powerful pull of what was in front of them and the carnage that ensued.
“Food freezes when you’re preparing to shoot, and we didn’t try anything,” says Neel. But he gives praise for Samoun’s fish dip, Pot’s favorite, and masgouf – a fried carp dish that Hussein says he couldn’t have, and which eventually helped lead the US military to him after his regime was overthrown in 2003, when he was found. spider hole in the desert.
For those who may wonder what prevents a chef from playing the hero and killing a dictator, the film makes it clear: the idea never happens. Entering a dictator’s inner circle requires a level of deep trust that also ensures distance from outsiders. “Where I was there was a lot of food,” says Furlanis, recalling how his Italian grocery orders would arrive in the Hermit Kingdom in a matter of days. When he announced that he would share his surplus food with the starving North Koreans – many of whom were said to be on a diet. grass and tree bark – His offer was quickly rejected. “A chef just needs to cook,” says Odera, a chef in Uganda. “There is no other story.”
Samoun, who was Pol Pot’s former cook, will no longer agree with the man who arranged her marriage, paid for her wedding and gave her to the man who planned to kill about 1.5 million to 3 million Cambodians in four years. In one of the film’s most challenging moments, one of Neel’s translators contradicts his account, recalling his own experiences of being beaten and tortured by the Khmer Rouge.
“He wasn’t answering the question,” Neel recalls. “And I said to (the interpreter), because I knew his history, ‘You have to tell him what happened to you.’ Everyone wants to be polite. Everyone wants to forget things, even the people who went through them. This is the terrible line that tyranny leaves: the victims of the government live their lives next to the people who benefited from it. “
This disagreement seems to have brought Samoun to a breaking point. “Even though he made a mistake, it wasn’t all bad,” he says, crying.
All the while, Coco Pacheco – Chile’s Emeril Lagasse – remains steadfast in his devotion to Augusto Pinochet. They keep Pinochet’s star-studded helmets under the mirror, keep photos of their days together and remember his military coup in Chile as a brave fight against the spread of communism. He prepares a table of his boss’s favorite food, puts it in an empty place and burns it. “We never talked about politics,” says Pacheco. I laughed a lot with him.
Speaking of the tens of thousands Pinochet killed, tortured and forced into exile, Pacheco treats the story with the gravity of an omelet ticket. He said: “He had to give orders that he didn’t want to give. “That’s life.”
Hussein’s former chef is also loyal, calling the president who used chemical weapons against his own people “the father of Iraq,” and comparing his execution after his trial – it happened on Eidevery day – death in the family. The chef speaks under a pseudonym and appears on screen as a black silhouette, his anonymity kept more out of fear of Hussein’s enemies than family members or former allies. “His body was changed, his voice was changed – we wanted to make sure that some of it couldn’t be changed by AI,” says Neel. “One thing I really liked was the idea that he was just an a-hole.
How to Feed a Dictator rests on a central premise: that people help create dictators the way they support them, and that the chefs who support these regimes are simply removed from society at the end of the day. Looking at this, one is reminded of another American president who was attracted to the authoritarians of the past and present, and how he practiced power politics – even if he liked it. fast food and Diet Coke they sit awkwardly beside the highly refined palate of a dictator.
Neel has considered including Donald Trump in his film – although, “to be clear, he is.” no a dictator.” “He wants to be one, but he is not.” I actually found a chef who cooked for him before he was selected. But after Trump was elected, the chef disappeared. He never spoke to me again. Why? Perhaps he was afraid of interfering with his work. Maybe he had a big gig. “
