‘The President's Cake' Review: Hasan Hadi's Warm and Heart-Tugging Tale Sends Dutiful Kids on an Odyssey in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

Yahoo

20-05-2025

Stay at a film festival long enough, and you will eventually notice certain shared themes and connective tissues between movies. Even then, the happenstance link between Hasan Hadi's compassionate directorial debut 'The President's Cake' and Fatih Akin's quiet epic 'Amrum' is something of a shock, as both movies send their young protagonists onto grand quests to gather around basic supplies like flour, sugar, eggs and so on at times of tragic scarcity born under dictators.
Then again, as specific as this plot similarity is, perhaps its emergence shouldn't be that much of a surprise, considering the current, war-torn state of the world that's once again victimizing children. Filmmakers trying to navigate our present-day realities would dig into their own pasts and memories. With 'The President's Cake,' Hadi has done exactly that, closely following his lead-character Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, in an impossibly soulful performance).
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It's Iraq in the 1990s — as Hadi remembers it. The film is set among the Mesopotamian marshes of his childhood, where school children glide through marshlands in canoes to get to their classes, at a time when everyday Iraqis across the country were starving due to U.S. sanctions. And still, Saddam Hussein, like a Marie Antoinette of sorts, continued threatened consequences if Iraqis did not celebrate his April 28 birthday with a lavish cake, as if supplies were easy to attain. Every school created a pool of students to do the cleaning, supply a fruit platter, decorate and, finally, bake a frosted dessert.
In her small town and modest school, which often pledges allegiance to Saddam with collective chants, that last holy (and expensive) duty falls on the intrepid Lamia, who lives with her sacrificing grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and doesn't go anywhere without her beloved rooster Hindi. While the sight of Lamia carrying around the proud cockerel has the makings of an image straight out of a children's tale, nothing in the little girl's life has storybook qualities. Her living conditions don't necessarily foster studying habits, even though she tries hard to keep up with her academics. Sadly, Lamia's ailing grandmother can no longer take care of her, planning to hand her upbringing onto a local couple from better means.
What's Lamia to do if not run away from her eventual fate, while also gathering the ingredients to bake Saddam's cake? Her shouty teacher had ordered an extra creamy filling too. Joining Lamia in her journey, two days before the forced countrywide celebrations, is her best friend and neighbor Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), stuck with the task of procuring some fruits for the occasion. The two team up, hitching a ride to a nearby city with more ample supplies. First, they find themselves in the truck of a seemingly helpful mailman (Rahim AlHaj), a character that returns later on. (It's genuinely funny when Lamia asks, 'Are you Allah?' to him once she realizes his reach in delivering the mail all across the country.) Later on, they manage to procure some eggs, evade a close call at a bakery as Lamia tries to steal flour and get duped by an array of cruel adults who take advantage of their innocence. In one of the most heartbreaking incidents, Lamia sells his family heirloom watch in exchange for counterfeit money.
While 'The President's Cake' mostly plays like a genial fairy tale, with superbly balanced humor and drama, Hadi still unsparing about the ills of patriarchal society. As such, the kids witness a male grocer taking advantage of a hungry and very pregnant woman, trying to lure her to the backroom with the promise of cases of high-end foods. (When the young woman pleas 'Don't you see my condition?' in protest, the slimy guy simply suggests that it is thanks to her pregnancy that there would be 'no risk.') In a later scene, Lamia narrowly escapes the claws of a similarly corrupt and ill-intentioned predator, using her wits and sharpened intuition.
With the likes of Chris Columbus and Marielle Heller among its executive producers, Hadi's film has the makings of a commercial arthouse winner, filled with observant period details in its lived-in production design — the organized chaos of the roads, the dust in the air, all the Saddam-related signage and so on. 'The President's Cake' especially pulls at the heartstrings when Lamia and Saeed briefly and predictably turn against one another, after establishing their sweet camaraderie through some wonderfully written dialogue and chatty bickering. It's in these emotionally intimate moments that Hadi and his cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru especially reach for expressive lighting to amplify the kids' dignity, as well as thoughtful close-ups of the film's wonderful young cast — Saeed's toughened-beyond-his-years visage, and Lamia's dramatic eyes, often on the verge of tears.
What packs a punch in 'The President's Cake' is the film's relatively uneventful ending. The kids might get their cake and return to relative safety in the conclusion. But Lamia and Saeed's future doesn't come with any colorful icing on top.
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