There are moments in this sly documentary that evoke regular food porn, with crisply lit footage of vegetables being chopped and simmered, meat getting grilled, fat bubbling and browning – all the culinary sizzle is on display. Then there are climactic money shots, obligatory overhead views of the finished product, elegantly garnished, accompanied by text identifying the dish as, say, a Chilean country stew, or a whole roast goat, made precisely to suit the taste of a very specific client. It’s just that the clients these chefs served were despots, including Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Augusto Pinochet and Kim Jong-il. Charles Otonde Odera once prepared a human heart “perfectly” for Amin, though at the time he thought better than to ask where the raw offal came from.
Director Andrew Neel and editor Brad Turner skilfully weave together interviews with the chefs, each one in denial to varying degrees about their culpability in the repressive state apparatuses for which they worked. Odera in some ways is the most clear-eyed and honest, with Cambodian Keo Samoun coming in a very distant second, claiming she was just a kid (still in her teens) when she was recruited to cook for Pol Pot. Mind you, Samoun still brings a tasty spread of foodstuffs to her former employer’s grave to nourish his spirit. Meanwhile, Chilean cook Coco Pacheco is completely unrepentant, proud to have done his bit to tickle the palate of the man responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of his fellow countryman. Ermanno Furlanis, on the other hand, still just looks a bit baffled how he ended up making pizza for Kim Jong-il while millions of North Koreans starved.
The contrast between the lavish spreads of food while the poor of the nation withered away, forced to eat grass or murder their own children to spare them from suffering (as explained in the brutal Iraqi segment) turns out to be a feature, not a one-off. This kind of monumental cruelty and capriciousness is parsed intelligently by journalists such as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is as rigorously unforgiving here as she is articulate, and Riccardo Orizio, who provides a perspicacious bird’s eye view of dictatorial cuisine. This is one food-centric film that’s unlikely to have an tie-in cookbook.
• How to Feed a Dictator is at Bertha DocHouse from 7 August.
