The Chonkerton

How to Feed a Dictator

entertainment

According to The Guardian, a new documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival examines an unexpected lens on dictatorship: the personal chefs who cooked for history's most brutal leaders, including Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, and Augusto Pinochet. Five chefs share their intimate experiences living in extraordinary luxury while their employers terrorized entire nations. The film explores how ordinary people become complicit in authoritarianism — not through ideology, but through circumstance, material comfort, and proximity to power. Some chefs remain devoted to their former employers; others grapple with the moral weight of their choices. The documentary suggests that sustaining dictators is as much a human act as toppling them.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/09/how-to-feed-...

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