Poverty and opulence, the pastoral and the high-tech, war and peace, childhood and adulthood. Opposite ends of a variety of spectrums meet, and sometimes clash, in Hasan Hadi’s remarkably assured feature debut The President’s Cake. These meetings may be violently abrupt, as in the movie’s heart-stopping final scene, or wryly ironic, as in its first shot, where fighter jets zoom above a rural community, travelling across marshes via canoe to a food market. Or these meetings may be gradual, one of many journeys taken through its story, whether physical, emotional, or political.
The plot is simple, direct, and has the ostensible quality of a vehicle for social commentary — that it is, though the plot itself has a quasi-metaphorical quality so naked it’s patently textual, never subtextual. Some time in the 1990s, a nine-year-old Iraqi schoolgirl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), is assigned the task of baking her class’ celebratory cake for the birthday of the nation’s leader, Saddam Hussein, a task bestowed unwillingly upon all classrooms in the country. Lamia lives the humblest of existences with her grandmother and their pet rooster, and the pair must travel to the nearest city to source the ingredients for the cake. The President’s Cake follows a well-trodden Neo-Realist path here — lower-class protagonists on a day-long odyssey through a city as rich with promise as potential disaster, encountering an array of helpful, helpless, and hostile people on their brief but eventful travels.
Key to the success of Hadi’s conceit is that he makes the Neo-Realist conveniences, immediately identifiable to cinephiles, work for his story, rather than making his story work for them. The people Lamia meets each have their own motives and agency, feeling neither like blunt narrative tools facilitating some development in her journey nor like indulgent detours, but rather like authentic portrayals of ordinary citizens as real and believable as she is. The plot’s race-against-time quality is never belaboured, nor is the cumulative stress and indignity heaped upon Lamia as her seemingly simple quest becomes ever more frustrated — these elements just quietly build in intensity as events befall our protagonist, enduring each challenge thrust upon her with the innocent objectivity of a young person on a mission.
The President’s Cake is a graceful, perceptive movie, where the authenticity of Hadi’s approach is accented and complemented by some beautiful touches. Pain and tragedy are offset by dark humor, as in a car ride where a recently blinded groom-to-be jokes about never having to see his bride’s face. The darkness reaches startling levels, as young Lamia is a prime target for adults, apparently only a little less desperate than she, willing to take advantage of her naiveté, though hardly prepared to be taken advantage of in return by her wiliness and resilience. The most poignant moment in the movie occurs when Hadi engages in perhaps his sole overt stylistic flourish — the camera leaves Lamia to share the POV of her friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), as she dances with a singer in a café. He views them in a wall-mounted mirror, live and animated in reflection, as still images of Hussein appear to observe from next to the mirror. Gauche portraits of an already antiquated present, obsolete symbols of forced devotion, silently watch a living portrait of a moment of real joy in the real present.
The President’s Cake has all the elements of a quaint, speciously life-affirming tale of a child on a journey to maturity over one memorable episode; in plain terms, it’s very much such a tale, but Hadi avoids any quaintness through his incisive depictions of real life. The verisimilitude is constructed with humility and sensitivity, and you largely forgive the minor contrivances due both to this fact and to the fact that they serve Lamia’s story so well. Elegantly shot and fabulously acted by a mostly untrained cast of humans and one hugely winning rooster (truly, what movie wouldn’t be improved by the addition of a chicken?), this is a lovely, sincerely touching work, and one of the most impressive debut features of modern times.
Published as part of London Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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