Director: Hasan Hadi
Writer: Hasan Hadi
Stars: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem
Synopsis: In 1990s Iraq, 9-year-old Lamia must bake the President’s birthday cake. She scrambles to find ingredients for this compulsory task while facing potential punishment if she fails.
Set over a weekend in Iraq in 1990, with international sanctions against its brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, the citizens are encouraged to be ready for combat (this is a few months before the invasion of Kuwait, followed by the Gulf War) against foreign aggressors. However, the poverty is quite obvious, and citizens in the cities are scrambling to get as many supplies as they need, not because they are stacking supplies during the harsh sanction period, but because it is Hussein’s birthday. To honor him, people must make a cake, including a school where strict rules are enforced in defense of Saddam, and Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef) has the unenviable task of getting those ingredients.
Lamia lives with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and her pet rooster in a village along the marshes. Bibi has diabetes and is no longer fit to work in the fields, but they barely have money. While people line up to receive fresh water courtesy of the President, other essentials like flour and sugar will not be easy to obtain or even find. There’s the threat of punishment if she fails to get it, and Lamia’s teacher tells the class, “I’m just a soldier and I must report anyone who refuses to obey.” He even mentions the parents of another student when detailing what happens if they defy orders; while he doesn’t say what happened, we can assume imprisonment and probably death. For Lamia, she must succeed by any means necessary.
However, going into the city with Bibi, Lamia learns the trip is not for looking for those ingredients, and Lamia flees. She runs into classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), who also has the equally unenviable task of finding fruit as part of the collection, and they go on their quest to hustle, barter, and, unfortunately, steal their way into getting what they need from different places. Bibi, meanwhile, finds no help from the police as they are too busy with other things to go look for a peasant girl. The story focuses on the two children going on a trek similar to Abbas Kiarostami’s Where’s The Friend’s Home?, and Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
These kids, about nine years old, are thrust into a world that demands full obedience and hardship for their dear leader, a man who doesn’t mind killing his own people while also living the decadent lifestyle of a secular Westerner. Everyone is dressed up, holding guns, and playing soldier for a bloodthirsty man who wouldn’t be toppled until 2003. In the middle of this, while he maintains his popularity, Lamia, Saeed, Bibi, and the rest of the people are moving around trying to survive the harshest of economic conditions. Corruption lies everywhere they go, yet they encounter those small moments of humanity and humor that give hope to these children.
In his directorial debut, writer/director Hasan Hadi brings us back into his childhood and makes a tragicomedy from such horrid circumstances. It’s a film that clearly made a strong impression; it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Camera d’Or (best first feature) at the Directors’ Fortnight portion, and was chosen by Iraq for their Best International Feature nominee for the Oscars. And, when your executive producers include screenwriter Eric Roth (Killers of the Flower Moon), writer/director Marielle Heller (A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood), and director Chris Columbus (Home Alone), that’s a pretty strong support group that loved Hadi’s coming-of-age story, one he had to grow up in.
More impressively, The President’s Cake is a modern neorealist piece where Hadi got non-actors to play these roles on location and encounter some nefarious situations. This is right from the school of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica, masters of the style, who did the same thing in post-war Italy. This is a wonderful period piece about an era that is foreign to us, outside of who Saddam Hussein was, but Hadi does a great job in allowing us to follow the sad folly of working for pride and being paid back in fear. “The walls have ears,” the teacher says in one scene. All of this, as the final moment of the film shows, for a man who liked cake but was hungrier for other things.
