Movie Review: The President’s Cake

By John Corrado

A young girl is selected to bake a cake for her school in honour of President Saddam Hussein’s birthday in Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi’s debut feature The President’s Cake, which serves as a charming neorealist throwback.

Hadi’s film is set in Iraq in the early 1990s, where, despite mass starvation caused by food shortages from heavy sanctions imposed on the country, everyone is required to celebrate Saddam Hussein’s birthday.

Our young protagonist is Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), a poor nine-year-old girl who lives with her elderly grandma Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and a pet rooster named Hindi. When Lamia’s name is drawn in a class contest to bake the cake in honour of the president’s birthday, this sends her on a stressful journey through the city in search of ingredients.

Finding and affording to buy these four seemingly simple ingredients (flour, sugar, eggs, and baking powder), when they barely have enough food to eat themselves, proves challenging and requires some childish ingenuity. Lamia is joined on this quest by her classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a budding pickpocket. They encounter a variety of colourful characters, including a charming mailman (Rahim AlHaj), but also plenty of others who don’t have good intentions.

Hadi’s film is clearly modelled after other neorealist films about childhood, with the most famous example obviously being Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and a more recent one being Sean Baker’s The Florida Project. In keeping with this tradition, the film was shot on the streets of Iraq, using a cast of mostly non-actors, which gives a scrappy quality to it.

Nayyef’s naturalistic screen presence proves an asset, with the young star impressively handling the more inward emotional moments as well. The other defining aspect is the cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru, who not only does a good job of capturing foot chases through crowded streets and markets, but also offers some clever framing to tease out new information, including during a scene in a Mosque.

There is a delightful element to The President’s Cake in how it is framed as a childhood adventure (Home Alone director Chris Columbus and Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth hopped onboard as executive producers, which gives you a sense of some more populist influences). But there is a heartbreaking undertone to it as well, poignantly showing a war-torn country through the eyes of a child.

Hadi’s film has enough levity to be fully cognizant of the absurdities of living under a dictatorship, building to a memorable conclusion that is almost tragicomic in its seeming inevitability. This would be a good choice for families with older kids as well to get them introduced to international cinema.