When Saddam Hussein was in power, the former Iraqi leader marked his birthday by demanding the entire population celebrate with him.
In classrooms, children were selected to bake a cake – a dubious honour that first-time filmmaker Hasan Hadi revisits in his remarkable drama The President’s Cake. At a time when Iraq was under strict sanctions and food was scarce, the ritual left scars that Hadi still carries.
Set in Chibayesh, the film follows 9-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) as she scrambles to find the ingredients she needs. Hadi calls the film “the result of me as an adult questioning my childhood”.
Borrowing a sense of naturalism from Italian neorealist films such as Bicycle Thieves, he unexpectedly describes his film as a black comedy. “He’s asking you to bake a cake that requires flour and sugar, which were illegal to have or sell in Iraq at the time.”
Hadi grew up in southern Iraq and never had to bake the cake himself. Instead, he was chosen as a flower-bearer – a far simpler task in the rural area where he lived. The story was inspired by a school friend who was selected to make the cake.
“He couldn’t deliver and his fate changed completely, because the school expelled him. And then he had to join Saddam’s children’s army. This is one of the things I felt haunted by. What if it were me?” His friend later died.
It is not difficult to sense Hadi’s anger and guilt over what he and many others endured in the 1990s. “As a child, I was frustrated with my parents that they couldn’t afford anything I wanted. They sold everything they loved and had collected through years of work and hardship, bit by bit, to survive. Now as an adult, I feel so much pain and shame.
“The pain of saying ‘we cannot afford that’ is way greater than anything else, because that’s the worst thing any parent can go through.”
Life under the sanctions imposed during the Saddam regime was predictably grim. “We didn’t know anything was happening outside the country. We didn’t have any access to the outside world,” he says. “It was almost like a prison Saddam made. We didn’t see any TV. We didn’t see any news. You live in a bubble. It’s like a North Korea situation when you believe what you see.” The fighter jets that fly overhead in the film represent the international community. “They used to watch, but were silent.”
All cinemas were closed, and Hadi discovered movies only through illicit VHS tapes exchanged among family members. He recalls being enthralled by Godzilla films, watched without Arabic subtitles. Later came the visually rich works of Andrei Tarkovsky – Ivan’s Childhood is a key influence on The President’s Cake.
Hadi's early exposure to cinema, however, was limited to the smallest of screens. “I remember I watched – and it will break your heart – Lawrence of Arabia on an 18-inch TV.”
After Saddam was deposed and executed in 2006, Hadi felt “overwhelming joy”, although the years that followed remained fraught. “We are still a wounded nation and we are healing. But the thing about sanctions and dictatorship is, they don’t just destroy buildings. They destroy the fabric of society, the morale of the humans in that society.” He sees echoes of this in Gaza today; the trauma, he says “is going to haunt them for generations”.
When The President’s Cake had its premiere in Cannes earlier this year, it became a rare breakout. The first Iraqi film ever selected for the festival’s official programme, it won both the Audience Award in Directors’ Fortnight and the Camera d’Or for best first feature. The film has continued to gather momentum wherever it screens, and has been named Iraq's submission to the 2026 Academy Awards.
Hadi, who now lives in Baghdad after studying at the American University of Beirut and New York University, believes the film may finally draw sustained international attention to Iraqi filmmakers.
“I think it will have a good impact on the cinema there,” he says, though he laments the lack of government support for the country’s skeletal film industry. “When you go to a country that barely makes one or two films every couple of years, that’s not an industry. That’s a hobby.”
Hadi is considering his next move. He may make a film in English, but his instinct is to remain focused on Iraqi stories. “When I was making this film, I wasn’t feeling so much pressure. For the next film, I feel a different kind of pressure, because the expectations are higher. That’s what I’m more anxious with.”
Judging by the assurance of his debut, he has little to worry about.
The President's Cake screens at Doha Film Festival on Sunday
