A lyrical but punchy debut by writer/director Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a near-fairytale story about a poor little girl who is “chosen” by her class teacher to bake a cake to celebrate the birthday of the president, and then has to move heaven and earth to find the ingredients.
Because the president is Saddam Hussein and because the little girl is a Marsh Arab – focus of Hussein’s genocidal wrath – the baking of the cake has a special importance. Get it wrong and it’ll be seen as an insult. Who knows where that could lead?
And so Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) heads into Baghdad with aged grandma Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) to find eggs, flour, sugar etc. Or so she thinks. Instead the grandmother is covertly trying to offload her orphan grand-daughter – who she can’t take care of any more – onto a stranger. This is the first of several moments of crisis for Lamia, who will have several more in the big city, where eventually she will team up with classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), the cripple’s son, and discover what he really gets up to at the weekend.
Lamia and Saeed are a Hansel and Gretel pair, and the adventures they have are like something out of the Grimm brothers, with grandma Bibi a particularly Grimm-adjacent character, her face a network of lines like the canals on a desert planet. Reinforcing the sense that we’re in some fairytale realm is Lamia’s pet cockerel, clamped to her side the entire time. Though the cockerel is just a cockerel – there’s no magic, it doesn’t talk and there are definitely no comedic, Disney-familiar animal shenanigans.
This film won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, which is the prize awarded for fine cinematography. The Romanian Vladimir Panduru is the man responsible for its bold good looks, having just shot the Palm d’Or-winning Fjord for Cristian Mungiu. Give a busy man a job if you want it done well etc…
Which is to understate director Hasan Hadi and Romanian production designer Anamaria Tecu’s almost magical recreation of the look of Saddam-era 1990s Baghdad – old cars, men wheeling barrows laden with old tech – on what’s clearly a small budget.
Contrasting the scenes in the city, where the bulk of the movie plays out, are the ones on the Mesopotamian or Iraqi Marshes themselves, the flood plain of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which Saddam tried to drain in an attempt to drive its troublesome inhabitants out of the region, before deciding to bomb them – his “own people” – into submission. How beautiful this area is, how cool and watery, how effortless a life largely afloat seems to be. Nine-year-old Lamia looks perfectly adept at guiding her own boat to school, before setting out on the journey back home at the end of the day. Helicopter parenting it isn’t.
The sense of a personality cult in full spate pervades everything, with pictures, posters and murals of the smiling, virile president everywhere. It could all be quite oppressive and hard-going but the fairytale tone lifts it, little moments of humour in among the jeopardy lighten it and the light-as-air acting by the non-professional cast – perfectly cast and superbly natural – make The President’s Cake float along, until Hadi reminds us of some harsh Saddam-instigated realities of life in this benighted region.
Throughout, documentary realism relentlessly butts up against poetic realism – factual yet not without an eye for beauty – in the same way that comedy and brutal reality tangle together. It’s quite a feat to pull off and this is quite a debut for a new director. What will Hadi do next?
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
