The President's Cake

In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein didn’t throw extravagant parties to appease his people — he demanded them for himself. The President’s Cake begins in a small village in the Mesopotamian Marshes, an Iraqi wetland where boats are the preferred means of travel. It’s like a Middle Eastern Venice, and one of the most striking real-world film locations in recent memory: postcard-pretty as the sun sets and quietly ominous as fighter jets fly overhead. It’s two days before Saddam Hussein’s birthday, celebration of which is, of course, compulsory; our heroine is nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who has the misfortune of “winning” a draw to see who in her classroom has the honor of baking Saddam a cake. It’s not as bad as “The Lottery,” but it’s not the actual lottery either.

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Sugar, eggs, and baking soda aren’t exactly in abundance, what with the sanctions following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Lamia might as well be tasked with moving a mountain as she heads into the city on a daylong odyssey that’s by turns invigorating and distressing. Writer/director Hasan Hadi is operating in neorealist mode, echoing classics like Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon and Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine — including and especially in the casting of surprisingly gifted non-actors. Ahmad Nayyef is a pint-sized powerhouse as Lamia, delivering the kind of remarkably assured, naturalistic performance that only an unselfconscious child could. The power of her performance, like that of the film as a whole, lies in its elemental simplicity.

Lamia isn’t alone in her journey. She’s joined by her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), and cockerel Hindi, who at one point is in danger himself — if it’s possible for a rooster to be a good actor, then Hindi deserves some kind of award. The President’s Cake vacillates between the kind of low-stakes peril you’d see in a children’s movie and the real-world jeopardy that people living in Iraq at the time were met with every day.

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Lamia meets many adults along the way, some of whom help her but more of whom do the opposite: her naivete compels her to trust grownups, while the experience she gains throughout the day teaches her to keep her guard up in a way she’s never had to before. This is, among other things, a coming-of-age story about the harsh lessons that turn kids into adults.

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Whether she knows it or not, Lamia’s life is about to change. Her aging grandmother isn’t accompanying her into the city to help her find ingredients but to deliver her to a new family, as she no longer feels she can care for Lamia. The least fortunate are often burdened with the most responsibility, especially in patriarchal societies like theirs. As she hears Bibi instruct the woman who is to be her foster mother to “set her on the right path,” Lamia grabs Hindi and makes a run for it.

If it’s possible for a rooster to be a good actor, then Hindi deserves some kind of award.

At various points the movie feels like a crowdpleasing fairy tale, political docudrama, and a period piece showing how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Hadi melds those disparate elements into something nearly seamless that evokes the way children both see and experience the world around them.

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Making a movie like this that’s neither dour nor saccharine isn’t easy. Hadi has pulled it off with apparent ease, threading a needle that many more experienced filmmakers wouldn’t be able to. The President’s Cake premiered at Cannes, where it won the Camera d’Or for best first feature film; Hadi has also been nominated for a Director’s Guild Award in the equivalent category. Like his heroine, the director’s talent belies his inexperience.