The President’s Cake: child’s dessert odyssey presents a distinctive portrait of 1990s Iraq

In the early 1990s, Iraq was subjected to a wave of crippling sanctions in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait – sanctions that left the economy in tatters, plunged the middle and working classes into bottomless poverty, and led to a proliferation of corruption.

In the face of these extreme conditions, Saddam remained steadfast in conducting lavish celebrations for his birthday and forcing institutions nationwide to follow suit. Chief among the most bizarre undertakings imposed on schools were mandatory birthday cakes baked by students – a ritual that began in the mid-1980s and lasted until the fall of the Ba’ath party in 2003.

Iraqi first-time writer-director Hasan Hadi draws on childhood memories – shaped by his firsthand experience of the repercussions of the sanctions – in his striking, deeply moving feature, winner of the Caméra d’Or for best first film at Cannes in 2025.

Newcomer Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, in one of the most affecting child performances in recent Arab cinema, plays Lamia, an elementary school student residing in the marshlands south of Iraq with her elderly grandmother, Bibi (Waheeda Thabet). With Bibi made redundant from her job – a routine occurrence in the aftermath of the sanctions – the last thing Lamia needs is an additional financial burden.

Catastrophe strikes when Lamia falls victim to a class draw that imposes on her the job of making the notorious cake. At this time, the cake’s ingredients, flour, eggs and sugar, were considered luxury items. Their scarcity in the pair’s village propels them, along with Lamia’s best friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) and an endearing cockerel, to embark on a hazardous odyssey to a nearby city in search of the necessary supplies.

Along their journey, the pair cross paths with a constellation of figures: a jovial soldier blinded by an American missile and en route to wed a woman he has never seen; a benevolent postman carrying Saddam’s fan mail; a predatory shopkeeper who attempts to trap Lamia; and a pregnant customer who agrees to sleep with a grocery shop manager in exchange for some of the supplies Lamia is seeking.

At once a road movie, a magic realist fable and an incisive portrait of the seldom-seen Iraq of the 1990s, The President’s Cake recalls both Abbas Kiarostami and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955). But, far from pandering to a Western gaze, Hasan imbues his film with visual and narrative codes that are distinctly Iraqi, evincing a singular cultural and historical sensibility that was missing from previous Iraqi films.

A reference to the epic of Gilgamesh – one of humanity’s oldest surviving works of literature – gestures toward the nation’s submerged pre-Islamic heritage; the meticulous recreation of the Mesopotamian marshes as they were in the 1990s serves as an ode to a landscape obliterated and drained by Saddam in retaliation for the Shiite uprisings that originated there; the depiction of Ba’athist informant-teachers, instructed to report the slightest act of dissent, captures the moral erosion and pervasive desperation that came to define the period. The President’s Cake functions as an evocation of collective trauma and the Stockholm syndrome that millions of Iraqi children like Hasan grew up internalising.

The characters in Hadi’s Iraq fall into two camps: those struggling to preserve their humanity in an increasingly Darwinian terrain, and those already dehumanised by the indiscriminate sanctions carelessly imposed by an oblivious, detached West. Lamia belongs to the former camp: a determined girl struggling to carve out a place for herself in a world governed by a punishing malice she cannot yet comprehend.

Hadi deftly interlaces the starkness of sanctions-era Iraq with the marshlands’ mysticism – a realm steeped in impending loss. The water he repeatedly returns to carries not only the ghosts of the nation’s glorious past but also the fragile future and dreams of innocent lives like Lamia and Saeed. The marshlands’ meditative, otherworldly vistas stand in glaring contrast to the city’s exhaustingly cluttered hustle and bustle – a visual dialectic mirroring the divide between Iraq’s smothered soul and its ruthless lived reality.

To Hadi’s credit, The President’s Cake never slips into the misery porn of say, the Lebanese drama Capernaum (2018). The director infuses his work with humour, resisting any moralising over characters whose transgressions are inseparable from their declining society. He further underscores the relative liberalism of pre–US-invasion Iraq towards sex and religion, crafting what may well be the most authentic cinematic portrait of the Persian Gulf nation to date. At a time when the West continues to impose sanctions on so-called enemy states, The President’s Cake stands as a strong reminder of the human cost exacted by such policies.

► The President’s Cake is in UK cinemas 13 February.