<em>How To Feed A Dictator</em>

There is something hypnotic in the way Keo Samoun, the former chef of the Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, lays out fruit, vegetables, fish, and rice to prepare a food offering at the dictator’s abandoned gravesite. It is within this process that director Andrew Neel located his documentary, How to Feed A Dictator. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year to rave reviews praising its excellent food shots and its relevance in a time when new dictators are flourishing around the globe.

How to Feed a Dictator, a film by Andrew Neel

Black and White

The images of food are breathtaking. Cinematographers Ethan Palmer and Raphael Laski mastered the chiaroscuro technique on par with leading artists of classical painting. So, early in the film, when one of the commentators states that «food is an instrument of power,» another film comes to mind: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) by Peter Greenaway, a dedicated admirer of classical paintings. Only that The Cook is a feature film, and in How To Feed A Dictator, Greenaway’s playful approach has been replaced by plain comparison. The unambiguity certainly suits contemporary audiences better. It also assigns a particular role to cinematography and its black-and-white contrasts. These contrasts reinforce the narrative tension between lavish food indulgence and the worst crimes, which sometimes border on the fairy tale. Such as when Charles Otonde Odera, the chef of Idi Amin, was told to prepare a human heart for his chief, who believed that if you eat someone’s heart, they will not haunt you.

«food is an instrument of power»

Contrasts

Odera is the only chef who wasn’t even a little bit enchanted by his employer, and is now as poor as before he had been summoned to Amin’s kitchen. In a chilling scene, as he is preparing one of Amin’s favourite dishes, a whole roasted goat, he remembers how he survived a death sentence. Stories of his colleagues are told in contrast, too. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, the supreme leader of a country with hermetically sealed borders, invited Italian cooking instructor Ermanno Furlanis to teach his cooks how to prepare pizza. His orders for food ingredients from Italy arrived in a couple of days, while North Koreans literally had to eat grass to survive. Coco Pacheco glows as he praises his boss Augusto Pinochet for saving Chile from communists and celebrates the dictator’s sense of humour. At the same time, the images show endless lists of people who were killed or disappeared during Pinochet’s regime. Saddam Hussein’s chef, who proudly reports that the dictator liked to eat fish head because it contains a lot of omega-3, only appears in the film as a black shadow. This mystery subtly underscores that Hussein’s passion for a traditional carp dish eventually gave him away while he was hiding. The chef’s devotion to the dictator is absolute and, again, in sharp contrast with the fact that people in Iraq have been starving while he was lavishly indulging in whims such as having, in all of his more than 70 palaces, prepared food, three courses every day, and throwing it away. While being a good and generous friend to the chef’s family, he used chemical weapons against the Kurdish minority in Iraq.

These contrasts create a routine movement, with a slow but repetitive rhythm that corresponds to calibrated, precise actions during ingredient preparation, making cooking a ritual practice. Together, they demonstrate the mesmerising power of the cooking routine and plastically show how the protagonists of this documentary, through their daily work, managed to create for themselves a calm and safe zone amidst the worst atrocities.

How to Feed a Dictator, a film by Andrew Neel

Memorials to dead heroes

Keo Samoum began living in Pol Pot’s kitchen when she was 9 years old. She desired to leave her family to avoid famine, she says. The Khmer Rouge regime, which was exceptionally cruel, in 4 years of Pol Pot’s rule they killed between 1,5 to 3 million Cambodians, based its mechanism on giving power to children against the adults, often against their parents. Meaning children were victims and perpetrators at the same time. Keo Samoum survived, and Pol Pot helped her start her own life when she grew up, because she was fully subordinate. When an interpreter in the film tells her he was being beaten and tortured by the Khmer Rouge, she refuses to connect. «I don’t know much about it…. You experienced it. But I didn’t.»

The film is titled after the book published some years earlier, but it draws on many other sources, and some of the experts participate in the film itself. Among them is a journalist who published a book of interviews with dictators in 2002, who, in the film, admits that his grandfather was a follower of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and a member of the «Blackshirts» (defined by Wikipedia as «the paramilitary wing of the National Fascist Party»). «Do I blame him?» asks the journalist, who himself responds in this way: «I am not sure that I do because, then, everybody can be blamed. What’s the choice for the man on the street? To refuse to be a lawyer, a doctor, a railway man?»

At this point, How To Feed A Dictator turns towards itself. But the conclusion that everyone must be blamed is premature. Because the streets of Italian cities, their mountains and woods (to limit to one case only) are full of memorials, celebrating the memory of those brave women and men who, instead of going on about their own business, decided to rebel. It was a hard decision; they paid for it with their lives, but they made it, and it was different from the decision of the man who joined the Blackshirts. Besides, the film itself provides plenty of reasons why its protagonists also can’t be compared to those common people who silently accepted or even supported totalitarian regimes.

How to Feed a Dictator, a film by Andrew Neel

Cynicism and dictators of today

These details are important exactly because, as another expert argues in the film, today’s world is full of wannabe dictators. However, unlike the old ones, described in the film as “highly damaged people,” who suffered negative experiences and have constructed targets, such as “ethnic minorities, immigrants, who have to pay for their deprivation”, the dictators of today are cynical. They don’t need a particular reason; they scrupulously exercise power over others simply because they can. They keep on killing the Palestinians in Gaza to construct a high-class tourist resort on the ruins of their homes, for example. In other words, they are driven by the same belief that underlies the conviction that it is normal for common people to accept whatever regime they live under – the belief that people are driven purely by selfishness and greed rather than by unselfish or noble goals.