‘I wanted an Iraqi film where soldiers are not the heroes’: director Hasan Hadi on his captivating debut The President's Cake

A child’s-eye view lends a vividly sharp yet sweet quality to The President’s Cake. Set in 1990s Iraq, director Hasan Hadi’s film centres on nine-year-old schoolgirl Lamia (a gloriously expressive Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who is randomly selected to bake a cake to celebrate dictator Saddam Hussein’s birthday, a compulsory national holiday in Iraq. This is daunting homework; failing these state-ordered festivities will mean heavy punishment. In a country wrecked by tyranny, war and crippling UN-imposed sanctions, sourcing ingredients such as eggs and flour is also a mission that forces Lamia, her elderly grandmother Bibi (Waheeda Thabet) and her similarly impoverished classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) far beyond their home in the marshlands. 

The film, 37-year-old Hadi’s debut feature, has already earned international accolades, including the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, and was the first Iraqi film to ever make the Oscars shortlist for best international feature (though ultimately it wasn’t nominated). Its drama – simultaneously dreamlike and hard-hitting – draws deeply from his own childhood in sanctions-era Iraq. Watching the film also struck me intensely; I was born in Baghdad during Saddam’s rule but raised in the UK, where we feared that openly criticising Iraq’s president could have dangerous repercussions for our many loved ones still living there. 

Hadi discovered his passion for movies as a child, while “smuggling” bootleg videos from a mysterious collector’s house for his cousin. “One of the rooms in this house was full of VHS tapes: Bruce Lee, Tarkovsky, Godzilla,” recalls Hadi. “At home, we had an 18-inch TV and VCR, and I put on one of the tapes. Suddenly, I started to watch a different world I was not aware of. This was a period when Iraq was really isolated from the outside world, and the regime [Saddam’s Ba’ath party] also built walls around you. When I watched a good film, fire sparked in me.”

For Hadi, the idea of making films originally seemed fanciful. It was also an irresistible ambition; he applied to New York University’s Tisch School, whose film-making alumni include Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Chloé Zhao and Oliver Stone, and was awarded a full scholarship – which took three years to start, due to repeated visa rejections and an on-off travel ban on Iraqis entering America.

During his time stateside, Hadi was also mentored by Hollywood screenwriter Eric Roth, who is one of the executive producers on The President’s Cake. Hadi describes the movie as “truthful but audience-friendly”, and insisted on filming in Iraq using a local cast of non-actors. All these elements make for a visually beautiful picture, full of subtly powerful details (the contrast between ancient Mesopotamian landscapes and contemporary hardship; the costume design; the yearning melody of the classic Iraqi song Hadi uses). The performers create a captivating emotional bond, particularly as the youngsters navigate a ruthless environment.

“The idea of a girl facing a whole society on her own was so frightening – but it clicked that this should be the perspective,” he says. “Men are victims of sanctions, but kids and women end up carrying most of the weight. In Iraq, that was very visible; I could remember it in my own household.”

Saddam is a looming spectre throughout the film – seen in framed portraits, street murals, a larger-than-life cutout paraded by a rally, and demonically grinning in an archive video clip. It’s hard to overstate how unsettling his image feels for Iraqis who lived under his stranglehold – even those in the diaspora. I was a schoolgirl during the 1990 Gulf war: a scene-shift when Iraq’s brutal dictator went from being a friend of the west to a foe. I watched the destruction of my birthplace onscreen, via live news footage of “smart missiles” and bombastic Hollywood movies, where the Iraqis (usually white actors in brownface) were terrorists, “insurgents” or bullet fodder.

Hadi admits that some of his older cast members found the period detail triggering (“they would cry that it reminded them”), but says it was important to depict 90s Iraq for a global mainstream audience.

 “We feel the impact of it until now,” he explains. “Sanctions change the whole fabric of society, and once the cycle of corruption starts, it becomes very difficult to stop; you need to rebuild the whole generation. Because the human conscience is insanely powerful in justifying its wrongdoings.

“I didn’t want to make a ‘political’ film. I wanted to make a film about these two kids, show you their life, and you make the judgment; whose fault is this? Is it the international community which bombs them and cuts access to all the food? Or is it the dictatorship who asked the people to do this?”

Besides depriving Iraq’s civilians of vital resources (including medicines), the sanctions also sank formerly stable professionals like teachers into desperate poverty. Admittedly, it’s tricky to empathise with Lamia’s sneaky and menacing teacher in The President’s Cake, as he steals from her schoolbag and boasts to the class that he is a government informer. Hadi says: “One of the challenges was making the kids in the cast understand the fear of Saddam. I drew from my childhood memory; I knew I was scared of Saddam, but the really scary person was the teacher.”

Despite its undeniably bleak narrative, The President’s Cake is laced with tenderness and absurdly funny twists. In one scene, a newly blinded soldier consoles himself while travelling to attend his own arranged marriage: at least he needn’t worry whether his bride is beautiful. I suggest that tragicomedy is a quintessentially Iraqi genre; Hadi smiles. “I think it was necessary to ridicule our pain. It gives us some healing. And comedy is always an enemy for the dictator; it takes away their power.”

The film’s Arabic title actually translates as Kingdom of Reeds, and the story is additionally a love letter to Iraq’s gorgeous marshlands and their communities; Hadi grew up nearby, in the country’s south. “Some of these locations have so much subtext,” he says. “The film has this fairytale style; the marshes are the birthplace of [Mesopotamian legend] Gilgamesh – a mythical place that’s actually real; a place that Saddam destroyed, that was restored after his death.”

Iraq’s cinematic tradition has developed not in waves but fragments, constantly disrupted by political forces. My Baghdad relatives recall weekly cinema trips, mainly to watch Egyptian or American movies, before sanctions. Saddam’s regime splashed big cash on pop-culture propaganda, even hiring British actors and directors such as Oliver Reed and Terence Young to make 1980s blockbusters Clash Of Loyalties and The Long Days – the latter glorifying Saddam’s assassination attempt on former prime minister Abdelkarim Qasim. But Iraq’s cinema archives also yield genuine treasures, such as the neo-realist drama Saeed Effendi (1957), which was beautifully restored by the Iraqi Cinematheque (part of the national archives) for the “Iraqi pavilion” at Cannes last year, but has yet to secure major distribution.

While film-making has resumed in Iraq, supported by the Iraqi Film Fund, and boasts internationally acclaimed directors such as Maysoon Pachachi (whose 2021 drama Our River… Our Sky was shot in postwar Baghdad) and Mohamed al-Daradji (Son Of Babylon), Hadi argues that there is still much need for resources and representation. 

“I wanted an Iraqi film where soldiers in F-16 jets are not the heroes,” he says. “It’s the everyday Iraqis, the ones that end up as numbers on your news headlines – these people are fighting for the simplest thing, and they are the real heroes.”

The President’s Cake is in UK and Irish cinemas from Friday, 13 February