The President’s Cake (2025)
There is a particular kind of cruelty that arrives not as violence but as paperwork. A nine-year-old girl is assigned to bake a birthday cake for a dictator. She cannot afford the ingredients. The country cannot afford them either, largely because of him. Hasan Hadi builds his entire debut feature on this single, devastating absurdity, and for the most part he earns it.
The President’s Cake is set in 1990s Iraq during the grinding period of UN-imposed sanctions that followed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) lives with her grandmother Bibi in the Mesopotamian Marshes, a world of reeds and roosters and managed expectations. When draw day comes at school, Lamia is selected — in spite of her clearly well-practiced attempts to be overlooked — to bake a cake in honour of the president’s birthday. Sugar, flour, and eggs are scarce. The authorities, it turns out, are far more exercised about the birthday than about any of this. Lamia and her friend Saeed set off into the city on a two-day ingredient hunt, selling her late father’s watch to fund the mission, and navigating a world that has its priorities arranged in a particular order, and children do not feature prominently on the list.
The performances are the film’s beating heart. Nayyef is, to put it plainly, extraordinary. She registers frustration, grief, and sheer stubbornness in the same expression without appearing to act any of them. Waheed Thabet Khreibat as Bibi brings a stoic, lived-in warmth that requires no translation, and Sajad Mohamad Qasem as Saeed supplies the comic relief with enough genuine charm that you forgive him his impulsiveness — repeatedly. That Hadi drew all of this from a predominantly untrained cast, filming on location in Iraq, is the kind of fact that makes you reassess what “professional” is supposed to mean.
Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru shoots the marshlands and city streets with a realist eye that nonetheless finds unexpected beauty in austerity. Hadi’s widescreen compositions are formally confident for a debut, and in my opinion the gap between that expansive frame and the cramped, fearful lives it contains is a deliberate choice rather than an aesthetic accident. The film knows what it is doing with space.
Where it is less sure-footed is in tonal management. The tragicomic register it reaches for, with its evident debts to Kiarostami and Panahi, occasionally slips into something more schematic. Certain city encounters feel designed rather than discovered, and the episodic structure, though serviceable, can let the emotional air out at inconvenient moments. There is also a critical argument, made by Iraqi writers among others, that the film’s portrait of the country risks flattering Western festival expectations more than it challenges them. It is a charge worth sitting with, even if the film’s warmth and specificity do a fair amount to deflect it.
None of which is to dismiss what Hadi has made. The film understands, without ever announcing the fact, that scarcity can be a political instrument — that when flour and sugar disappear from the shelves, someone usually arranged for that to happen. It carries this knowledge lightly, which is exactly right.
The President’s Cake does not achieve the transcendence it occasionally seems to be aiming for. But it aims honestly, it treats its characters with respect, and it trusts its audience rather more than most films do. A decent cake, then. Not quite fit for a president, but considerably more nourishing than anything he deserved.