The President's Cake

AroView: A rare film from Iraq, and one to savour as a rare insight into life under Saddam Hussein’s rule in the early 1990s that was suffocating under international sanctions. Yet it’s a gentle story told through the eyes of a nine-year-old who finds herself duty bound to bake a cake in honour of the infamous president, a task set by her fiercely nationalist school-teacher.

With little means of support or sympathy, she ventures into town to try to gather the ingredients, negotiating her way through a dysfunctional urban society in a way that recalls the childhood classic ‘Salaam Bombay’. Its simple yet powerful metaphor of a common people sacrificing all for the will of an authoritarian leader is one that keeps echoing through time and across the continents.

“It’s difficult to think of another debut that combines such crowd-pleasing sensibilities, political resonance, and cinematic sweep.” ~Rory O’Connor, The Film Stage

“Hadi’s film is an exceptional screen debut, as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the bombers overhead, brimming with life.” ~Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

“It captures the strange disjunction between the monotony of daily life for children in a war zone and the anxiety between adults who are aware that everything could fall apart at any moment.” ~Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com