Cannes 2025: The President’s Cake
The President’s Cake
Cannes 2025: Directors’ Fortnight
Director: Hasan Hadi
By Rehna Azim
If The President’s Cake isn’t a major contender for Best International Feature during awards season, I may be tempted to stage a one woman riot outside the Dolby Theatre, in Hollywood, in protest!
It is my favourite film, by some distance, from Cannes 2025.
As director Hasan Hadi said at the Q&A after the screening, some of the best films come from the simplest premise.
The premise here is as simple as it comes. A young schoolgirl has to find the ingredients to bake a birthday cake.
But from that basic premise Hadi weaves a multi layered, lyrical tapestry of emotion, history, politics, tragicomedy and exploration of the human soul, which is as engrossing and heart wrenching as it is visually gorgeous to watch.
For the cake in question is to celebrate the birthday of Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq in the 1990s, at a time when UN backed sanctions are crippling the Iraqi populace whose food is rationed to cruel levels; one egg per family.
The school girl is 9 year old Lamia (captivating newcomer Banin Ahmad Nayef). Lamia, an orphan, lives with her ailing grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) in the Mesopotamian Marshes (lushly filmed in dreamlike muted blues and greys while visits to the city are filmed in a glaring, sometimes harsh light). Fighter jets fly over the sleepy marshes to remind us of the bigger political concerns that overshadow and lay siege to the small lives and modest ambitions of the population below.
Each morning Lamia paddles a boat to school which she usually enjoys. But on this day, the teacher, an ex soldier, is to draw lots to decide what food each child is to bring to the school ‘party’ to celebrate the birthday of the man whose portraits adorn every public space and to whom the children robustly pledge allegiance each morning. Lamia is terrified her name will be drawn for a task she has no financial means to complete.
Her worst fears are confirmed when the crumpled piece of paper bearing her name is picked from the box, by the teacher who tells her to bake the best cake and fill it with cream.
Not complying with the ‘request’ is not an option. The threat of being reported to the authorities and her family publicly humiliated lies ominously heavy in the air.
With her beloved rooster, Hindi, in her arms, a head full of panic and empty pockets, Lamia sets about trying to find a way to gather the ingredients she needs.
She confides her worries to her friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), who has been tasked with bringing fruit to the celebration. He boasts of being taken to the city by his cripple father and going to the amusement park where you can ride a dragon to the sky but he is as impoverished as Lamia and doesn’t know how he will get the fruit that will be his offering.
When her grandmother takes Lamia to the city, with a desperate plan to ensure a decent future for her after she, the grandmother, is gone, the distraught girl runs away, in fear.
Thus begins a journey in which Lamia, Hindi and Saeed, who she encounters in the city, come face to face with the kindnesses, cruelties, petty bureaucracies, corruption, exploitation and challenges of a society that is both rotting from and surviving the traumas inflicted upon it.
Hadi has an eye for the smallest detail and his recreation of 1990s Iraq is meticulous despite the logistical challenges he encountered making the film because so much of what he wanted to depict no longer exists. “The 90s demolished the cultural identity of Iraq.”
He was determined to film on location even though the money men advised him to film outside the country.
He also used non actors which was a difficult sell too.
Despite the ever present image of the President, Hadi insists the film is not political. “It’s the first film made about this era in Iraq and it’s an important piece of modern history but the film is from the children’s perspective, it’s not political. There are no sides taken. It’s for the audience to make their own judgements.”
With Nightbitch director Marielle Heller and Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) as executive producers, this is the little film that might surprise in the coming months. It has already won the Directors’ Fortnight People’s Choice Award at Cannes. This honour, hopefully, is a harbinger of bigger things to come.
5/5