Duniya Journal

by Imtiaz Popat

The President’s Cake (Mamlaket al-Qasab) is a surreal vivid story set in before the Gulf War against Iraq, it comes out in on back drop of the anther Gulf war, this one against Iran. New York-based writer/director Hasan Hadi draws on his own childhood in 1990s Iraq under the regime of President Saddam Hussein.  At the time, the country faced UN-backed sanctions, leading to extreme poverty and food shortages.  Saddam still required all Iraqis to celebrate his birthday.

To live in 1990s Iraq was to live in Saddam Hussein’s shadow, his image plastered onto walls across the city and his name drilled into the psyches of children. He scripted himself as a savior to a country hollowed out by the Gulf war. This is the Iraq first-time filmmaker Hasan Hadi remembers growing up in, a snapshot seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) whois tasked with providing a nice President’s birthday cake for her school class. 

Along with her pet rooster Hindi, her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and a classmate Waheed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Lamia ends up in the city, looking for ingredients like flour, sugar and eggs, even if it means selling her late father’s heirloom watch.  But it turns out that Lamia’s grandmother is in the city for another reason. 

The film was shot in Iraq in real historical locations, including the Mesopotamian marshes (believed to be the birthplace of civilization), where people still live as they did thousands of years ago, paddling by canoe to get around.  In the city, a restaurant scene actually takes
place at the restaurant where Saddam used to eat when he was young.

Lamia’s odyssey begins with an assignment that feels deceptively simple: She is charged by her ex-soldier schoolteacher to bake a cake in honor of the president’s birthday. It’s evident that the task is truly a test of obedience. One of the first scenes of the film features schoolchildren, including Lamia, chanting, “With our blood and our souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam!” beneath the sound of fighter jets. Hadi carefully stages this atmosphere of mounting tension, where baking a cake is haunted by the quiet terror of getting it wrong. 

The President’s Cake is carried by the remarkable performances of its predominantly amateur cast, especially its child actors. Nayyef and Qasem convey how children adjust to the environments they live in as their characters traverse and adapt to their fractured home. The pair’s overwhelming frustrations are also punctuated by moments of joy, from a staring contest to Nayyef dancing with a cafe singer.  

At times, the odyssey leans on a fairy-tale chain of coincidences, but what lingers is its fidelity to lived experience. Hadi conveys the blunt, unvarnished realities of everyday life, particular under immense pressure. The director channels his childhood to comment on issues that are no less familiar today: power, patriarchy, poverty, and most of all, the damages of war.

Coming out during Ramadhan and with back drop of another Gulf War, the filmography is very vivid and is really worth watching on the big screen at this time during the Oscar award season. The film won both the Caméra d’Or (best first feature) and the Directors’ Fortnight
Audience Award at Cannes 2025.

The film is in Arabic with English subtitles. The President’s Cake is being released in Canada by Mongrel Media.