The President’s Cake
Charming neorealist Iraqi drama about a young girl in the 1990s – during the war with the United States – who sets out to find ingredients for a cake to honour Saddam Hussein’s birthday. Winner of the Caméra d’Or in Cannes.
Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake 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, nine-year-old Lamia lives with her ailing grandmother, Bibi, trying to get by 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 a harmless 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 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 classmate Saaed 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.
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.’