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How to Feed a Dictator

Play trailer How to Feed a Dictator 2026 1h 35m Documentary Play Trailer Watchlist
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HOW TO FEED A DICTATOR follows five chefs who once cooked for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il -- drawn in by poverty, necessity, fear, or ambition, and sustained by a willful blindness to the atrocities unfolding just beyond the kitchen door. Shot across seven countries and based on the acclaimed book by Witold Szabłowski, director Andrew Neel blends intimate testimony, rare archival material, and lush cinematic food imagery to create a film as visually seductive as it is morally unsparing. The sensory beauty of cuisine -- the gleam of a perfectly roasted cut, the ritual of a market at dawn -- is captured with the reverence of the finest culinary documentary, even as historical testimony reveals what that care sustained. Mesmerizing and deeply unsettling, HOW TO FEED A DICTATOR lingers like an aftertaste: a reminder that even the most intimate act of nourishment can feed something monstrous.

Cast & Crew

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Andrew Neel

Director

Keo Samoun

Self

Riccardo Orizio

Self

Coco Pacheco

Self

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Self

Ermanno Ferlanis

Self
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How to Feed a Dictator

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Movie Info

Synopsis HOW TO FEED A DICTATOR follows five chefs who once cooked for Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, and Kim Jong-il -- drawn in by poverty, necessity, fear, or ambition, and sustained by a willful blindness to the atrocities unfolding just beyond the kitchen door. Shot across seven countries and based on the acclaimed book by Witold Szabłowski, director Andrew Neel blends intimate testimony, rare archival material, and lush cinematic food imagery to create a film as visually seductive as it is morally unsparing. The sensory beauty of cuisine -- the gleam of a perfectly roasted cut, the ritual of a market at dawn -- is captured with the reverence of the finest culinary documentary, even as historical testimony reveals what that care sustained. Mesmerizing and deeply unsettling, HOW TO FEED A DICTATOR lingers like an aftertaste: a reminder that even the most intimate act of nourishment can feed something monstrous.
Director
Andrew Neel
Producer
Michael Merlob, Andrew Neel, Catherine Rehwinkel
Production Co
Co Created Media
Genre
Documentary
Original Language
Arabic
Runtime
1h 35m