Art & Culture

‘The President’s Cake’—Or The History of Saddam’s Iraq Through the Unbiased Eyes of a Child

BYMeriem Belhiba

November 25, 2025

Some histories are too big to fit into documentaries or books. The President’s Cake is one of them. The film tells the story of the late Saddam Hussein’s Iraq under sanctions through something very small: a young girl sent on an impossible mission to bake a birthday cake for the president. Her eyes end up revealing the whole reality around her.

Set in the mid-1990s, during the toughest years of sanctions, filmmaker Hasan Hadi wanted his film to feel like something shot in 1995, forgotten in a drawer, and then rediscovered. And that is exactly the feeling the film gives. The attention to detail—the colors, the clothes, the objects—makes every moment look and feel like real life from that period.

Hadi’s ability to recreate the decade comes from the fact that he lived through every part of it. He grew up south of Babel and stayed in Iraq his entire life, leaving only for four years to study in New York. Because of that, the film doesn’t feel researched, but remembered. Set between Baghdad and the Marshes, it carries the stories of both places quietly in the background of every scene. Hadi knows these landscapes, the people who lived in them, and the history they survived—especially the communities of the Marshes whose world was drained, burned, and nearly erased under the former Iraqi president’s rule.

What anchors all this is the film’s extraordinary realism. Shot entirely on location with nonprofessional actors, the performances feel lived rather than performed. You see the burden of life in their posture, the heaviness of their gestures, the quiet sorrow in their eyes. Even the way they speak—slow, tired, and slightly guarded—carries the weight of years spent surviving more than living. Nothing feels scripted or rehearsed.

As Hadi notes in a media briefing at Doha Film Festival, “all the characters in the film are people I know in real life.” Their presence makes you forget you’re watching a film at all; it feels like stepping inside someone’s memory rather than watching a re-creation. The Iraqi music in the background adds another layer of depth, grounding the scenes in familiar sounds that quietly carry the mood of the 1990s.

At the center of all this is a single child. Over four days and one impossible task, nine-year-old Lamiaa walks from her marshland home to the nearby city carrying her rooster Hindi—her closest friend and the only toy she owns. Through her journey, innocence becomes a way of seeing the country clearly. She carries more than ingredients for a cake; she carries the quiet burden of an entire nation living under sanctions.

To understand her world, we must remember what Iraq looked like in the mid-1990s: a country crushed by dictatorship and by some of the harshest international sanctions of the modern era. These sanctions were imposed by the United Nations Security Council and shaped, enforced, and prolonged mainly by the United States and the United Kingdom, devastating a population already weakened by years of war.

Hadi says he tried not to make a political film (“this is one of many children’s stories,” he explains), but even this simple story cannot escape the politics of that decade. Anyone who grew up in Iraq remembers a moment that defined its cruelty. Namely, in 1996, when journalist Lesley Stahl told Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that half a million Iraqi children were reported dead because of the sanctions, “more children than died in Hiroshima,” before asking whether the price was worth it. Albright’s answer—“we think the price is worth it”—is a sentence Iraqis have never forgotten. For them, it was not a policy explanation. It was a judgment on their lives.

What gives the film its strength is how little the protagonist understands. Lamiaa doesn’t know why shops are empty, why adults look exhausted, why hospitals overflow, or why American jets roar overhead. She has never heard of Madeleine Albright or the decisions taken by the United Nations. All she knows is that she must bring a cake to school for a man whose smiling portrait hangs everywhere—on walls, in classrooms, on military trucks, even on carts that sell nothing because there is nothing left to sell.

Through this child’s-eye journey, the film restores a human face to years often reduced to political language. This is not the Iraq of “policy decisions” or “international strategy.” This is the Iraq that lived those decisions, and paid their price.

The more Lamiaa tries to fulfill her task, the more absurd the country becomes. A nation running out of food is asked to celebrate. A dictator’s birthday requires ingredients no one can find. The president smiles from every portrait while his people wither behind the frame.

Because Hadi refuses to explain or comment, The President’s Cake becomes one of the most quietly political Iraqi films in years. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t accuse. It simply shows life as it was lived—under dictatorship, under sanctions, under a sky that never seemed to lift.

And in doing so, it restores something history books rarely manage: the human cost. Through the steps of one small girl trying to bake a cake, the film remembers the lives behind the policies, including the half a million children whose deaths were once said to be “worth it.”

The film premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won both the Caméra d’Or for best first feature and the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award — a rare double distinction for a debut. Its MENA premiere took place at the 2025 Doha Film Festival as part of the International Feature Film Competition, marking a significant moment for contemporary Iraqi cinema on the regional stage.

‘The President’s Cake’—Or The History of Saddam’s Iraq Through the Unbiased Eyes of a Child

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‘The President’s Cake’—Or The History of Saddam’s Iraq Through the Unbiased Eyes of a Child

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