Inside ‘The Tasters: Silvio Soldini on telling an absurd wartime food history

Originally published in The Indiependent on 20 March 2026

(Source: Lumière & Co)

The Tasters, directed by Italian director Silvio Soldini, is a gripping wartime drama that sheds light on one of the most obscure groups working inside Adolf Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters. They are the tasters, young women forced to sample the dictator’s meals to check whether they had been poisoned. 

Adapted from Rosella Postorino’s historical novel The Women at Hitler’s Table, inspired by the testimony of one of the tasters Margot Wölk, the movie follows Rosa Sauer, a young woman whose husband fights on the Russian front. She moves to a rural village to stay with her parents-in-law, fleeing the bombing of Berlin in 1943, yet is forced into an even more dangerous situation when Nazi soldiers take her and several other women to work as tasters. As Silvio describes, Rosa leads audiences into “a microcosm where this absurd thing happens”; she and other tasters could die eating delicious food, when hunger is all around her. 

“It’s the absurdity of all this that I really liked, and that’s at the heart of the film,” Silvio says.

The relationships between the tasters is also central to the film, which shows not just how they eat together and wait to see whether anyone collapses under the watchful eyes of soldiers, but also how they chat during breaks and hang out outside their forced work. Through these everyday conversations, the movie quietly reveals how war seeps into the most ordinary corners of life. “There’s love and friendship and tension between them, and at the same time, history goes on outside of this place. The Russians are coming, the Americans are coming; we don’t see all that, but it’s heard, and the violence is in the air.”

Another highlight of the movie is the sexual relationship between Rosa and a Nazi lieutenant, which allows them to briefly escape from the horrors of war. In Silvio’s opinion, it is a beautiful story. “I like the way that the two are: he is an SS officer, and she’s a woman who is kept there and could die from poisoned food,” he says. “But at the same time, they are two young people that fall in love. I think it’s very human, all this. It’s a nice story to tell.”

Silvio recalls how the dining-table scenes, some of the film’s most memorable moments, were shot. To capture the suffocating atmosphere, they were filmed in a single take before rounds of rehearsal. Camera movements were minimal. This allowed the sense of tension to grow and accumulate, while giving the cast freedom to showcase their individual characters.

Rather than presenting the tasters as heroic figures or portraying the Nazi officers as simple villains, the film focuses on the emotional realities of people trapped within the machinery of war, especially women. “In this novel, the story was so strong and the female characters were very important. [We wanted to] make a war film not by showing men somewhere outside, but showing the women and what happened to them, and feeling the violence of that moment on them,” Silvio shares. “All this together is very powerful, I thought.”

When asked what message he hopes audiences will take from the film, Silvio smiles. “I put the message in the movie,” he says. “If I could say a message with my words, I would not make a movie. I think there are a lot of things you can discover in this film, but everybody can take the message they want from it.”