Dinner for Few (2014)
Director: Nassos Vakalis
Writer: Nassos Vakalis
Producers: Nassos Vakalis, Katerinai Stergiopoulou
Music: Kostas Christides
During dinner, “the system” feeds the few who consume all the resources while the rest survive on scraps. Inevitably, the struggle for what remains leads to catastrophic change. The offspring of this transition turns out not to be a sign of hope, but the spitting image of the parents.
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Nassos Vakalis’s Dinner for Few is one of those short films that sneaks up on you, not through sentiment or suspense, but by forcing a blunt recognition: the grotesque isn’t fantasy—it’s our natural habitat. It’s four minutes of animated allegory so precise in its nastiness it feels like it’s been waiting for decades of corruption to crystallize. You watch pigs gorging themselves at a table while cats—thin, desperate, and obedient—crawl for scraps beneath them. The scene is too cleanly drawn to be taken as metaphor alone. Vakalis isn’t hinting that we’re like this; he’s saying we are this—a social order whose rituals of consumption have become indistinguishable from its self-destruction.
The animation has a compact, relentless energy, the kind that gives you no space for self-congratulation. There’s a brutal economy to the storytelling: no dialogue, no explanatory titles, just the rhythmic scrape of plates and the clatter of utensils, until the noise becomes a kind of industrial hum, a machine feeding itself on the illusion of plenty. The pigs, dressed in the paraphernalia of power—judge, politician, military man, media peddler—don’t eat food so much as devour the world. Every morsel they gulp down is manufactured from the very room they inhabit, as though existence itself were being dismantled to sustain their appetite. By the time the walls start to vanish, we realize that gluttony isn’t the consequence of their privilege; it’s the foundation of it.
Vakalis directs with the merciless focus of a man who has watched too many committee meetings, too many false promises about reform, and knows that decay in power doesn’t begin with malice—it begins with comfort. The pigs don’t need to conspire; their system is self-regulating, like a dinner service run by an invisible hand that serves the fat first and leaves the crumbs for the faithful. The cats below the table survive by licking what falls, their eyes wide with a mixture of dependence and resentment. They are the underclass as domestic pets—docile until starvation demands evolution. When they finally unite, transforming into a tiger that demolishes its oppressors, Vakalis gives the revolution its due moment of triumph—but only that. Out of the tiger’s carcass crawl new kittens, and the cycle begins again.
There’s a pitiless lucidity to that image. Most filmmakers would have settled for the easy moral: the people rise, the corrupt are punished, and some ambiguous dawn suggests renewal. Vakalis goes further—he strips revolution of romance. The tiger’s offspring aren’t symbols of rebirth but of repetition. The new order inherits the taste for meat. He isn’t saying people don’t change; he’s saying systems don’t. His view of civilization is that of a perpetual feast where each generation takes its turn at the head of the table, mistaking consumption for progress.
What gives Dinner for Few its sting isn’t its cynicism, but its accuracy. Vakalis compresses centuries of social theory into an orgy of chewing and belching. The animation is detailed enough to register disgust without resorting to realism—the pigs’ skin glistens, their mouths glop and flap with a tactile obscenity that’s both funny and queasy. The cats’ wide, mournful eyes carry the same programmed innocence you see in supermarket mascots or campaign ads. Even the snake that winds beneath the table—binding pig to pig, judge to soldier, politician to profiteer—feels less like a biblical symbol than an administrative one. It’s the bureaucracy of evil, quietly ensuring that everyone keeps their place.
What’s striking is how comfortable the film’s metaphors are to read, which is to say how depressingly familiar they’ve become. Viewers online call it a masterpiece of allegory, but there’s nothing mysterious about its message. We understand it instantly, because we live inside it. The food that appears out of the room’s material recalls the way modern wealth feeds on depletion—the conversion of forests, labor, oceans, and faith into currency. The judge’s death—he’s the first pig to go—is a neat stroke of irony: justice is always the first casualty in a feast of power. And the media pig, the one laying out the decoy mouse, is a perfect update on propaganda in the age of distraction; it throws out shiny movement to keep the cats’ attention away from the main dish. Vakalis’s world isn’t built on conspiracy; it’s maintained by design.
The short’s genius lies in how it refuses catharsis. When the table finally collapses, the audience gets the satisfaction of destruction, but it’s fleeting, almost perfunctory. The cats tear down the system only to replicate it. The structure is so cyclical it feels preordained. It’s as though Vakalis wants to warn us that outrage, too, can be a form of complicity—another ritual of feeding. The violence, like the meal, leaves everyone bloated and unsatisfied.
There’s an austere beauty to the animation’s palette—dusty browns and metallic greys that suggest a world stripped of vitality. The table, with its clean geometry, becomes a kind of altar where consumption is worship. Vakalis moves the camera in deliberate, symmetrical arcs, echoing the ritualistic nature of power: every bite, every scrap, every twitch of greed repeats in perfect rhythm. The absence of words intensifies the clarity. We don’t need dialogue; we already speak this language fluently.
It’s remarkable how closely the film aligns with the structure of classical tragedy while using the grammar of satire. The pigs’ downfall doesn’t come from rebellion alone, but from their own indulgence—they eat until there’s nothing left to eat, until the system devours itself. Vakalis stages this collapse with a sense of inevitability that borders on the mythic. The tiger’s emergence feels both terrifying and absurd, a parody of revolution where the oppressed rise only to become the new tyrants. The camera’s final gaze, circling the newborn kittens, offers no redemption. Civilization, he seems to say, doesn’t evolve—it molests itself into perpetuity.
The film’s brevity works in its favor. Ten minutes is long enough to be devastating and short enough to resist sermonizing. Vakalis knows the power of restraint: every image hits with the force of a punchline. The music by Kostas Christides adds a satiric lilt—a dinner waltz played for cannibals. It’s elegant and obscene at once, like champagne served in a slaughterhouse.
There’s a temptation to call Dinner for Few a political allegory, but that’s too polite. Politics is just one of its layers; beneath it is a moral vision so unadorned it’s almost zoological. The pigs and cats aren’t symbols of particular parties or classes—they’re functions of appetite. Vakalis isn’t preaching socialism or capitalism’s failure; he’s showing the futility of any order that depends on hierarchy. His universe is driven by hunger—literal, psychological, spiritual. Everything eats, and everything is eaten.
If there’s a faint echo of hope, it exists only in the act of recognition. The moment the lone cat looks under the table and sees the snake, we glimpse the possibility of awareness, but it’s instantly punished—dragged away, erased. Vakalis turns the whistleblower into an object lesson: knowledge without solidarity is useless. The cat’s discovery doesn’t change the order because truth alone has no power against appetite.
In its quiet savagery, Dinner for Few recalls those short political cartoons that used to precede newsreels, but sharpened into something almost biblical. Vakalis doesn’t moralize; he indicts. The grotesque elegance of his animation allows no distance for comfort. Watching it, you feel the same queasy complicity you get from reading the day’s financial news while eating lunch.
What lingers isn’t despair but recognition—a sense that the feast will continue as long as someone keeps setting the table. Vakalis has made a film that’s both complete and circular, a parable with no exit. The few dine, the many starve, the tiger roars, and the kittens begin to purr. The world resets, satisfied to call the repetition change.
