How to Feed a Dictator review – what was on the menu for some of the world’s most evil men

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Andrew Neel’s documentary contrasts the lavish dishes eaten by heads of repressive states – served by largely unrepentant staff – with the starvation faced by their citizens 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 Turn...
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Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

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She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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