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 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.

Powerful animation portrays experiences of a French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, with anecdotes about his father, a prominent leftist exile

With a title translated a little inelegantly from Le Parfum d’Irak to “flavours of Iraq” when “the perfume of Iraq” might have been simpler and better, this film is a powerful, vivid animation co-directed by Léonard Cohen with its author, French-Iraqi journalist Feurat Alani, robustly narrated in Alani’s first-person by the actor Malik Zidi. The animation style is stylised and expressionist: shapes and forms like silhouette cutouts suggest the piercingly insistent forms of memory.

It is about Alani’s childhood and fractured family experience growing up in Paris in the 80s as the son of a prominent leftist Iraqi exile who was forced out of his native country on account of his opposition to Saddam Hussein. The story itself is told through a loose series of flashbacks occasioned by his father’s funeral, at which mourners, members of Iraq’s 1970s socialist diaspora brought together by his death, start recounting anecdotes. To these, Alani adds his own reminiscences of going back to see his extended family in Iraq at the end of the 80s, and experiencing the madeleines of those flavours and smells of Baghdad and Falluja: the delicious taste of ice-cream and the fragrances of young men’s exotic hair oil.

In an often chilling new documentary, the chefs of brutal leaders from Idi Amin to Saddam Hussein, talk about their unusual lives behind the scenes

Kim Jong-il loved pepperoni pizza. Saddam Hussein couldn’t resist a fish barbecue. Idi Amin reportedly had the capacity for an entire roasted goat. The menus may have differed, but the appetite was the same. For history’s most notorious strongmen, the dining table doubled as a stage for power. For the cooks who served them, every meal came with extraordinary stakes. “It goes back to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil a bit,” says director Andrew Neel. “These everyday things that are beloved to us, like food, can take on an entirely different dimension within the context of a dictatorship.”

In his latest film, How to Feed a Dictator, which premieres at the Tribeca film festival this week, five private chefs recount their intimate experiences serving some of the world’s most feared dictators and the ever-present dangers that came with the job. Based on the 2020 book by the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski, the 95-minute documentary probes the fraught terrain between morality and survival, asking viewers to consider the choices these chefs made – and the choices they never really had. Structurally, the film is something of a tasting menu, serving up sobering morsels of human atrocity within the trappings of a decadent cooking show. It makes for especially uneasy viewing on an empty stomach.

Donald Trump ermutigt kurdische Kämpfer zum Aufstand gegen die Mullah-Diktatur in Iran. Doch die Volksgruppe hat schlechte Erfahrungen mit den Versprechen von US-Präsidenten gemacht.

Nach dem Tod des Ayatollahs sind viele Fragen offen. Trump sagt, er habe Vorstellungen zur künftigen iranischen Regierung, bleibt aber vage. Derweil bringt sich der Sohn des gestürzten Schahs ins Spiel.

Nine-year-old Lamia is obliged by her school to make a birthday cake for the Iraqi president, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredients

There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi film-maker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour, despite sanctions and the consequent shortage of every single cake-making ingredient. Hadi is a former Sundance Lab fellow and his film lists Hollywood heavy-hitters Chris Columbus and Eric Roth among its executive producers – who may just have induced Hadi to sprinkle some old-fashioned Tinseltown sugar into the mix. The moment when the little girl gazes at her reflection in the river is surely inspired by The Lion King.

Among the largely nonprofessional cast is the unselfconsciously excellent Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as nine-year-old Lamia, whose greedy teacher gobbles the apple she has brought to school for her lunch. This blowhard announces that the class must draw lots for which of them will bake the Saddam cake; it falls to Lamia. In addition, her pal Saeed (Sajad Mohama Qasem) – who has a crush on Lamia – has to supply the fruit for this party, on which only the teacher will be gorging himself. Lamia sets off into town with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) on a desperate shopping expedition, carrying her pet cockerel, Hindi, who gives a great animal performance and whose unpredictable crowings clearly forced the actors to improvise lines around him.

In spring 2003, exuberance at the fall of Saddam was swiftly followed by a descent into deadly chaos. Whether moving independently or embedded with troops, Guardian reporters witnessed the violence on the ground

The allied attack on Iraq began on 20 March 2003. The Guardian’s 4am edition on Friday 21 March carried the headline: “Land, sea and air assault.” The report was by Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Camp As Sayliyah, on the outskirts of Doha, the capital of Qatar. It opened: “The ground war began in Iraq last night as British and American marines stormed beaches on the Gulf coast in an assault on the south-eastern city of Basra, while explosions lit up Baghdad under a heavy bombardment by cruise missiles.”

The first British fatalities came shortly afterwards when a US helicopter crashed in Kuwait, killing all on board. Suzanne Goldenberg’s front-page report from Baghdad revealed that only two hours after the decapitation effort, Saddam Hussein himself had made a defiant appearance on television. A Guardian leader stated that the plain fact was this first “surgical strike” had missed its mark. Even had it reached its target, it would have been difficult to applaud. “State-ordered assassination sets an abominable precedent that encourages unwelcome emulation … The US must tread carefully – for the legal and moral grounds for this war are already very shaky.”

Did the 21st century begin on 1 January 2000? Or was it that blue sky day in September 2001 when the planes hit the twin towers? These images from the last 25 years chronicle modern history in the making

At the turn of the century there was a modest debate, mainly conducted on the letters pages of the newspapers – back then, still the prime forum for public discussion – as to when, exactly, the new millennium and the 21st century began. Most assumed the start date was 1 January 2000, but dissenters, swiftly branded pedants, insisted the correct date came a year later. As it turned out, both were wrong.

The 21st century began in earnest, at least in the western mind, on a day that no one had circled in their diaries. Out of a clear blue sky, two passenger jets flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and so inaugurated a new age of anxiety – a period in which we have lived ever since.

Am 8. Dezember 2024 floh Syriens gestürzter Machthaber nach Moskau. Dort lernte er, dass Putin die Seinen nicht im Stich lässt. Aber eine Bedingung hat der Kreml offensichtlich gestellt.