When director Hasan Hadi was a young boy in southern Iraq, nothing at his school mattered more than former president Saddam Hussein’s birthday.
Hadi remembers it vividly – the day he and his classmates, most under 10, put their names into a hat to decide their “assignments” for the celebrations. Hadi drew flower-bearer. Surrounded by the fecund marshlands, that was one of the easier tasks. He breathed a sigh of relief.
His friend, however, drew the most difficult one – he had to bake the cake. In another time and place, it would have been simple. But with sugar and flour both illegal to have or sell in Iraq at the time, it was all but impossible. The boy tried as hard as he could to source the ingredients, but to no avail. When he went to class and announced there would be no cake, the school promptly expelled him. He was forced to join Saddam’s children’s army and later died. Hadi never saw him again.
He thinks about that moment a great deal, though it feels different to him now with the perspective of adulthood – now that he understands the country as it was, and what it has since become.
There are many films made about children, but not all films about children are made for them. Some of the most enduring – Ivan’s Childhood, Fanny and Alexander, The Spirit of the Beehive, The 400 Blows – are essentially artists revisiting the years that shaped them, where innocence and disillusionment entwine.
The President’s Cake, Hadi’s directorial debut and Iraq's submission to the 2026 Academy Awards, joins that lineage. In it, a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), living in Chibayish, is tasked with producing the birthday cake. Accompanied by her pet rooster, Hindi, she embarks on a quiet, determined journey to find the ingredients she needs.
She goes to town – first with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), who is not sure she still has the energy to take care of this young girl herself, then with her classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem). Throughout town, Lamia interacts with adults with various agendas, both obvious and hidden, never quite sure who may help her on her journey and who may prey upon her innocence.
Although The President’s Cake began with the seed of his real childhood memory, Hadi isn’t retelling it literally. Instead, he revisits the atmosphere of those years – the scarcity, the quiet fear, the strange mix of humour and resignation – through Lamia’s journey. The film is not interested in political commentary so much as the daily logic that governed people’s lives, and how a child absorbs it without ever fully understanding it.
Hadi’s approach is striking yet understated. He shoots Chibayish with a naturalism that recalls Italian neorealism – long takes, non-professional actors delivering their lines matter-of-factly, spaces that feel lived-in rather than staged.
Lamia’s world is small but vividly textured: the creaking boats on the marshes, the informal negotiations between neighbours, the way everyone seems to know what cannot be said aloud. The tone is gentle, even humorous at times, but the humour comes from the absurdity of the situation rather than from any attempt to lighten it.
Nayyef’s performance anchors the film. She plays Lamia with a kind of stubborn clarity – a child who doesn’t yet understand the systems shaping her life, but can feel their weight all the same, refusing to bend to it. Hadi never sentimentalises her, nor does he place her as a symbolic victim. She is simply a child navigating a set of rules she didn’t choose.
What makes The President’s Cake most compelling is its refusal to translate these experiences into an outsider’s language. Hadi isn’t explaining Iraq’s past; he’s remembering it.
The film’s politics emerge through texture and detail rather than exposition: the empty shelves, the whispered conversations and the resigned acceptance that every small task requires navigating an invisible boundary. It’s a portrait built from lived memory, not moral instruction – before delivering a gut punch of an ending.
At times, Hadi seems to be recalling not only the Iraq of his childhood, but the Iraq that followed – the years when the old order collapsed, when corruption deepened and when the promises of liberation were drowned out by new forms of hardship. The film folds these timelines together not out of confusion but intention. The President’s Cake is not aimed solely at the contradictions of its former leader, nor does it reduce the past to a single source of blame.
It looks instead at how societies inherit their wounds, how the everyday distortions of one era bleed into the next. And in the distance, the rumble of American bombs sits as a reminder that whatever came after the Saddam regime would not be simple, or merciful or better.
In the end, the film’s quiet argument is unmistakable: children always pay the highest price for the politics they never chose, and a society that fails them inevitably shapes them in ways they cannot escape.
The President's Cake screens at Doha Film Festival on Tuesday
