One of the hidden gems of Cannes’ 78th edition has come from an unexpected country, selected for the first time at the world’s biggest film festival: Iraq.
Premiering in the festival’s parallel section, The Director’s Fortnight — which aims to promote emerging talented filmmakers from around the world — the film has been lauded for director Hasan Hadi’s singular and touching depiction of life under Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1990s, a period in which UN sanctions, US bombings, and authoritarian rule impacted all aspects of Iraqi society.
A President’s Cake explores these complex socio-political issues through the perspective and innocence of children, as we follow two Iraqi kids from the Mesopotamian Marshes who have to bake a cake and bring it to school to celebrate Saddam Hussein’s birthday.
That day, 28 April, was turned into a national spectacle during Hussein’s reign between 1979 and 2003 to celebrate the Iraqi ruler.
At the same time, much of the country was hungry and could not access basic food and goods due to a UN Security Council Resolution that passed on 6 August 1990, four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and blocked Iraq from importing any food.
The ban on food imports ended a year later with Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War, yet many sanctions on both food and medicine remained until the end of Hussein’s rule, partly due to the US’s influence in the UN Security Council. These sanctions heavily impacted almost everyone in Iraq, and hit the most vulnerable the hardest, while they accrued severe inequalities between the ruling class and the population.
“The film should serve as a documentation of a certain period to make people feel the experience of Iraqis, of society, and of these two kids during the sanctions,” Hasan tells The New Arab.
“People should be more aware that when they hear the word ‘sanctions,’ it’s not Saddam and his family who are not going to get food… so the film is an attempt to break the stereotype that sanctions are a non-violent idea,” adds the first-time director.
The events and life depicted in Hasan’s film are partly taken from his own experiences, as the filmmaker was raised in the south of Iraq near the marshes.
He vividly remembers how “Saddam purposefully tried to destroy this landscape, and I think it was one of the biggest crimes against the environment.”
Hasan went on to study a BA in Business at the American University of Beirut and then studied filmmaking at New York University.
It was in the US that he made key contacts in the film industry who would help him bring his first feature film to life. These notably include Eric Roth, who was nominated for seven Oscars and won one for Best Adapted Screenplay for Forrest Gump in 1994, and Marielle Heller, who won major awards for Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Melissa McCarthy and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood with Tom Hanks.
Both Eric Roth and Marielle Heller, whom Hasan met while he was a Sundance Lab Fellow in 2022, went on to become executive producers on A President’s Cake.
It’s been around 30 years since the events in which Hasan’s film transpires, a long enough period to confront the issues faced by Iraqi people back then and get the younger generation today to learn about how difficult and extreme conditions were, according to the film director.
“It’s much easier [to speak about this era now], but we need healing,” Hasan continues.
“Films can be a healing tool and a way to process your traumas, your history, your problems, your troubles, [to ask] what happened, what didn’t happen? Why was it like this? When you experience trauma, your mind blacks out. It tries to protect you from bad memories, from harsh years, from all that, and suddenly, when you open up, you remember you were forced to do this and that. You didn’t have money to eat, and you had to starve for a while,” he tells The New Arab.
“I feel it is important to explore this time more, because we feel the effects of it now. But we shouldn’t explore it from a political point of view. We should explore from personal points of view, from human points of view.”
Hasan chose to explore how Iraqi society was impacted by international sanctions, a despotic ruler, and US imperialism, but these political issues are in the background rather than the foreground of the film.
This is achieved mainly through its visual language, as Hasan’s directing, combined with the cinematography of celebrated Romanian Director of Photography Tudor Vladimir Panduru, shows us large canvases of Saddam Hussein painted in schools, and we hear the chants of protests in the streets of Baghdad against American forces.
But the centre of the film always remains the two children, Lamia and Saeed — performed movingly by Baneen Ahmed Nayyef and Sajad Mohamad Qasem — as they navigate a complex world they don’t fully understand, yet they do their best to survive, support each other, and find the ingredients to bake that precious cake.
Focusing on children and the amusing quest to make a cake under very difficult circumstances brings a mix of dark humour and deep sadness to many scenes in the film. This is a mood which Hasan says reflects the times of that period: “Some people died [back then] because someone made a joke about Saddam. It could be a perfect comedy. It feels like a Chekhov novel.”
The Iraqi filmmaker found the two child actors through street casting, meeting thousands of children across Iraq to find protagonists who were as close as possible in personality to the characters, so it wouldn’t be difficult for the non-actor kids to become them. They didn’t do rehearsals, and Hasan insisted on creating an environment “to make it feel as real as possible” for the child actors.
Ultimately, exploring Iraq during that time through the lens of children allows viewers to discover simultaneously how difficult it was to find necessities like eggs, sugar, and flour, and how normalised this was for people then.
“Children can be unbiased. They don’t need to be political,” Hasan says. “I really try not to take sides, and just show that yes, the UN did this, and yes, the US did this, and Saddam did this. It’s just a look at life. I’m not interested in taking sides or making a political statement.”
After receiving rave reviews in Cannes, The President’s Cake — produced by TPC Film LCC — is surely set to be one of the stand-out films of 2025 if it gets major partners. American film critic Pete Hammond wrote in Deadline: “With the right distributor, it could turn out to be Iraq’s first nominee for an Oscar. Yes, it is that good.”
But right now, Hasan Hadi is just trying to keep his feet on the ground and is taking things day by day.
“I hope to reach as many audiences as possible [with this film]. It feels very special and surreal to be here [in Cannes], I wouldn’t even dream about this.”
Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw
Follow him on Instagram: @alexander.durie
