The President’s Cake
Wednesday, April 29th
7:00pm at Galaxy Cinemas North Bay
105 mins | 2025 | Iraq, Qatar, USA
Dir: Hasan Hadi
Language: Arabic
The President’s Cake
Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake follows young Lamia, who’s selected to provide the cake for her class’s mandated celebration of tyrant Saddam Hussein’s birthday, something she and her ailing grandmother can ill afford. The film details the cruelty brought by extreme scarcity and a lawless leader.
Hasan Hadi’s heartbreaking The President’s Cake, a multiple award winner at Cannes, 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, young Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives with her ailing grandmother, Bibi (Waheeda Thabet Khreiba), eking out an existence 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 an innocuous 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 (plus Hindi, her pet rooster) 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 Saaed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) 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. The few who are ostensibly kind may be the worst of all. Lamia and Saaed are invariably confronted with pictures of a wealthy Hussein beaming cruelly at them, even on the back of a truck the kids jump on.
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.”
“The President’s Cake is notable for its unvarnished, affecting performances; its digitally shot yet eerily film-like cinematography, which packs an amazing amount of crisply focused information into wide frames with rounded edges. But most of all, for the way it captures the strange disjunction between the monotony of daily life for children in a war zone and the anxiety between adults who are aware that everything could fall apart at any moment.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com
“From the pastoral beauty of its opening sequence to the gut punch of its last, Hadi’s film is an exceptional screen debut, as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the bombers overhead, brimming with life.”
Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter
“It’s difficult to think of another debut that combines such crowd-pleasing sensibilities, political resonance, and cinematic sweep.”
Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage