“Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry of wonderful times to come”
– Bertolt Brecht

“Dinner For Few” is a ten minute CG-animated film depicting a sociopolitical allegory of our society. During dinner, “the system” works like a well-oiled machine. It solely feeds the select few who eventually, foolishly consume all the resources while the rest survive on scraps from the table. Inevitably, when the supply is depleted, the struggle for what remains leads to catastrophic change. Sadly, the offspring of this profound transition turn out not to be a sign of hope, but the spitting image of the parents…

Written and Directed by:
Athanassios Vakalis

Produced by:
Athanassios Vakalis
Katerinai Stergiopoulou

Music by:
Kostas Christides

EMMY award winning animation artist Nassos Vakalis directed and wrote the film and the animation was produced in the United States of America and Greece with the technical and artistic collaboration of Eva Vomhoff from Germany. “Dinner For Few” is produced and funded by Nassos Vakalis and his wife Katerina Stergiopoulou. The original music is composed by Kostas Christides and performed by the Bratislava Symphonic Orchestra.

“Dinner For Few” was inspired by the economic recession affecting South European countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Nassos Vakalis grew up in Greece, where his family and most of his friends still live. “Dinner For Few” not only reflects his deep concern of the social and economic developments during the crisis but also highlights the inevitable and cyclical nature of the human affairs throughout history.

Through its festival run “Dinner for few” screened at over 250 international film festivals and won 78 awards. It was one of the 60 Animated Shorts that Qualified for the Academy Awards in 2015.

In his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx famously wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The real problem, then, can be framed by the question: “How do we change the world?” When it comes to answering this question, artists are far more useful than philosophers. They have the ability to foreshadow events and solutions before things actually happen. Unfortunately, they cannot provide us with explicit instructions, simply because the existing hierarchical political system will not permit the world to change without violence, and will treat any proposed solution as a terrorist attack. That is why artists must resort to metaphors…

Compared to Denis Villeneuve’s film “Next Floor” (2008), which I posted previously, Athanasios Vakalis goes two steps further. First, by utilizing the somewhat freer medium of cartoon animation, he draws an explicit parallel to Orwell’s “Animal Farm” within his depiction of the insatiable ‘elite’s’ gluttonous orgy. The cruel tiger of revolution inevitably emerges as a consequence of the hierarchical separation of a small stratum of insatiable societal ‘rulers.’ Yet, that is not the end of the story. Through a metaphor, Vakalis gives us a hint as to what must be done: Every revolution creates its own hierarchy, which over time inevitably transforms into an insatiable ‘elite’…

And that cycle will not cease until, through revolution, the creators of the monstrous system of the Centralized Hierarchical Political Matrix are removed…