The President's Cake

Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake, a multiple award winner at Cannes, is an unforgettable look at a country crushed by poverty and international sanctions — and ruled by a sadistic, greedy, and vain tyrant.

In 1990s Iraq, young Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives with her ailing grandmother, Bibi (Waheeda Thabet Khreiba), eking out an existence in a remote village where the best means of travel is by meshouf, a kind of canoe. Disaster strikes when Lamia is “honoured” with bringing the cake for her school class’s mandatory celebration of Saddam Hussein’s birthday. In other circumstances, this might be an innocuous responsibility, but Bibi and Lamia can’t afford the ingredients — and the last family that didn’t comply was dragged through the streets.

Bibi and Lamia (plus Hindi, her pet rooster) head to the city to purchase the ingredients for the cake, or so Lamia thinks. But when Bibi surprises her with a life-changing plan, Lamia flees, determined to continue her quest, and enlisting Saaed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) to help. The pair’s wide-eyed determination and inventiveness is met only with disdain and contempt, and they are cheated or robbed by almost every adult. It’s the horrifying cost of scarcity and authoritarianism: complete moral collapse. The few who are ostensibly kind may be the worst of all. Lamia and Saaed are invariably confronted with pictures of a wealthy Hussein beaming cruelly at them, even on the back of a truck the kids jump on.

Shot in a neorealist vein, reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica or the early works of Abbas Kiarostami, The President’s Cake offers devastating cinematic proof of Bertolt Brecht’s famous dictum: “Grub first, then ethics.”