THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE

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Hasan Hadi’s THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE, a multiple award winner at Cannes, unfolds like a fable from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—a nation suffocated by poverty, sanctions, and the crushing weight of tyranny. 

In a remote village, young Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives with her ailing grandmother Bibi (Waheeda Thabet Khreiba), eking out survival at the margins. When Lamia is “honored” with bringing the cake for her school’s compulsory celebration of Hussein’s birthday, the task becomes a perilous burden. Ingredients are impossible to afford, and refusal carries dire consequences—public shame, punishment, even violence. 

Accompanied by her pet rooster and later joined by her friend Saaed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), Lamia embarks on a journey that feels both intimate and allegorical. Along the way, kindness turns cruel, innocence is betrayed, and the dictator’s smiling image haunts every wall and truck they pass.

Rendered in a neorealist style that recalls Vittorio De Sica and early Abbas Kiarostami, Hadi’s film transforms one child’s quest into a haunting parable about scarcity, authoritarianism, and the fragile endurance of hope.