Talkies Community Cinema: The President's Cake

Hasan Hadi is an Iraqi film director and screenwriter and The President’s Cake is his charming debut feature film.  It’s set in early-90s Iraq when a 9-year-old girl, Lamia, from a Marsh Arab community, is required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour. It’s a simple tale on the surface but the film paints a many-layered portrait of a country surviving under sanctions with a totalitarian leader at its head.

Lamia, her grandmother Bibi, and her streetwise friend Saeed set off on a desperate shopping expedition for the ingredients, encountering a succession of vivid characters along the way.

Hadi explains that the film’s setting and story were born out of familiarity.  “It’s a mix of my memories growing up in Iraq,” he says, and he weaves those memories with meditations on morality and justice in a bustling environment where resources are scarce and adults are often self-centred and sometimes malevolent.

The nuanced performances by the young actors are a driving force of the narrative but casting wasn’t simple.  Iraq has no film industry.  “We were basically going around looking for kids. looking for adults, because we don’t have acting schools.”  But clearly, the use of non-actors paid off handsomely. And the cake-tasting itself turns out to be an explosively important climax.

The film has won a number of awards:

• Cannes Film Festival 2025: Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award and Caméra d’Or (Best First Feature film)
• Miskolc International Film Festival 2025: CICAE Jury Award, FIPRESCI Jury Award for best International Film, International Ecumenical Jury Award.
• Hamptons International Film Festival 2025: Best Narrative Feature.
• Stockholm International Film Festival 2025: Best Debut.

Footnote: In the 1990s Saddam Hussein systematically drained the marshes to punish the population for an attempted uprising, displacing hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs and reducing the wetlands to a desert.

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