‘The President’s Cake review’: Quinzaine crowd-pleaser is set in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

Dir/scr: Hasan Hadi. Iraq/US/Qatar. 2025. 102 minutes.

It could include fairy-tale substances, together with a dangerous lottery, a pet cockerel confidante and kids on a mission, however The President’s Cake comes iced with the unsweetened actuality of life beneath Saddam Hussein in Nineteen Nineties Iraq. New York-based Hasan Hadi, who grew up in southern Iraq, steps up from brief movies with a assured and humanistic debut that could be a kindred spirit of Iranian kids’s films equivalent to The White Balloon and the youth-focused work of Hirokazu Kore-eda.

A kindred spirit of Iranian kids’s films equivalent to The White Balloon

Its successful central performances, more and more shifting story and concepts which might be accessible to older kids in addition to adults ought to assist The President’s Cake go down effectively with distributors and audiences after its debut in Cannes Administrators’ Fortnight. The presence of Nightbitch director Marielle Heller and Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) as govt producers will additional increase its profile.

Life in Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes for nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef) and her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) is way from straightforward. Worldwide sanctions on the nation are biting deep, making meals and drugs scarce and pushing costs by means of the roof – a scenario that’s economically introduced house as we watch Lamia’s grandma haggle over tomatoes. Fighter jets reducing throughout the sky in an in any other case idyllic scene of boats crusing by means of the marshes remind us that that is the true world, although, full with all its risks.

The inhabitants’s battle doesn’t cease dictator Saddam Hussein from insisting everybody celebrates his birthday, with the movie unfolding over the 2 days main as much as one such occasion. The despot is a recurring presence within the movie, with photographs and propaganda work of him adorning the partitions virtually in every single place – only one ingredient of the exact manufacturing design from Annmarie Tecu. That, together with a soundtrack that includes music pushed by conventional devices from the likes of Khyam Allami and Omar Bachir, creates a vibrant sense of time and place.

For the children on the native faculty, together with Lamia and her greatest good friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Saddam’s birthday means their names are put right into a tin for a draw that appears as threatening as something in The Starvation Video games. These unfortunate sufficient to be chosen have to offer objects for the celebrations or face dire penalties. Saeed is chosen to convey fruit whereas Lamia finds herself on the hook for the cake. Armed with a listing of substances, a handful of saleable possessions – together with a pocket watch that when belonged to Lamia’s father – and the little lady’s scene-stealing pet cockerel Hindi, Lamia and her grandma head off to the closest metropolis.

A journey from a passing, jovial mailman (oud participant and composer Rahim AlHaj proving he additionally has appearing chops) is the primary of a smattering of coincidences that pepper the story however these match effectively with the drama’s extra fairy-tale parts and are used sparingly by the director. When Lamia realises her grandma has extra than simply procuring on her to-do record, she runs off with Hindi and, after encountering Saeed, turns into decided to purchase the substances, whereas her ailing grandma makes an attempt to influence the police to search for her granddaughter.

The buzzing flies in Tamas Zanyi’s (Son Of Saul) wealthy sound design are simply the beginning of strategies that one thing is rotting. Corruption is rife, whether or not it’s taking apples from kids or a lot worse. The kids strategy each problem with a purity that places them liable to exploitation, including pressure to virtually all their encounters, even people who initially seem benign or useful, particularly when coping with the patriarchy. The informal means through which they’re taken benefit of by adults provides to the sense of the predatory being a part of on a regular basis life.

The harsher wider world is leavened by the youngsters’s friendship, and the author/director drawing on his younger stars’ pure vitality as their periodic staring contests turn into more and more resonant. Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s digicam additionally pays shut consideration to Nayef, whose participating efficiency is as a lot about her shifting physique language and micro-expressions as it’s about dialogue.

Hadi has an eye fixed for element, echoes and lyrical touches. Firecrackers and a cola bottle dropped from a top create bomb-like explosions, eggs maintain a fragility, whereas a bit of material caught in an updraft carries a flutter of the religious. He injects conventional parts with unpredictability that reminds us in the true world glad endings usually include a query mark.