Cannes Review: The President’s Cake Has All The Ingredients of a Breakthrough Directorial Debut

Among the best things in The President’s Cake are the colors. There’s the deep red of a rooster’s comb as it peeks out from a young girl’s carrying pouch; there’s the white decorations that adorn her uncle’s blue car; and then there is the opening vista, in which a deep evening sky is disturbed by the roar of two American fighter jets. We’re somewhere in the ’90s, the country is Iraq, and the decorations are for its president, Saddam Hussein. Soon the camera will peel away to reveal a group of villagers lining up for water. If this is the length people are going for basic requirements, you soon begin to wonder: what chance does anyone have of finding baking soda?

Hasan Hadi’s Cake premiered in Directors’ Fortnight and won the audience award. Then, at the closing weekend, it was given Cannes’ coveted Camera d’Or for best first feature from a jury headed by Alice Rohrwacher. This would be a remarkable achievement for any film, let alone the first to represent Iraq in the festival’s long history. Hadi is New York-based these days (he works as an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch) but the story is drawn from personal experience of that time––particularly the ritual of celebrating Hussein’s birthday, which was compulsory for every citizen, regardless of means or U.S. sanctions. It’s a situation the film approaches with downbeat humor. One small part of this involved drawing names in the classroom, with the least-lucky student having to provide a cake. Fail to deliver and the consequences would be drastic.

This is an incredible set-up for a movie, and not merely for its clear sense of place (Hadi shot on location) or political context. Baneen Ahmed Nayyef stars as Lamia, a 9-year-old girl who has to travel with her elderly grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), to the city to source the four ingredients they need to avoid social humiliation, or much worse; in one startling moment does Lamia’s militaristic school teacher, not one to mince his words, remind the kids of a family that got dragged through the streets for not complying. Along the journey they meet her uncle, Jasim (Rahim AlHaj), who gives a ride, and run into Lamia’s classmate, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), who’s been tasked with getting fruit. As is customary, the children end up alone and have to fend for themselves. Some of the encounters are played for laughs. Others come laced with peril. It’s never less than engaging.

Watching The President’s Cake, I began to wonder if Jafar Panahi’s presence in Cannes’ competition might have held it back: so easily does Hadi’s film pass the eye-test, it’s difficult to understand how it could have slipped through the competition’s fingers. It might help to know a thing or two about what happened in Iraq in the early ’90s, or perhaps to have some familiarity with the great canon of cinema from the region that focuses on children, but neither is required for entry here. I was particularly drawn to color because it’s among the last things we think of when we imagine films from Iraq: the unfortunate byproduct of three decades of Western perspectives in which the palette was rarely more interesting than sand and military fatigues.

Amazingly, the film’s grace notes––its moments of levity, its filmic style (credit to DP Tudor Vladimir Panduru), its dark humor––detract little from its political bite. Violence is ever-present in Lamia’s world, from the jet engines that roar above her village to the wounded soldiers she meets on the street. (That the children barely react to any of it is another stark reminder of all the awful things that young people in similar parts of the world are getting used to these days.) We should mention that there is significant backing behind this film––Hadi’s last short, Swimsuit, was picked up by HBO; both Marielle Heller and Cristopher Columbus are amongst its executive producers; and no less than Eric Roth is credited as co-writer––but it’s difficult to think of another debut that combines such crowd-pleasing sensibilities, political resonance, and cinematic sweep.

The President’s Cake premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.

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