When Saddam Hussein ruled as dictator in Iraq, his birthday was treated as a national holiday, or at least an occasion for compulsory celebration. “The President’s Cake,” shot entirely in the country and set in the wake of the international sanctions imposed in 1990, examines that ritual from the perspective of a 9-year-old girl.
Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) lives in the Mesopotamian marshes with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). They travel by canoe. Lamia’s experience of school is already suffused with Hussein’s cult of personality: A mural of the leader decorates the outside of the building, and Lamia and her classmates are forced to recite an ode to his long life.
To assign responsibilities for the classroom birthday celebration, the teacher makes Lamia and her peers put their names in a tin. The heroine is selected for what is ostensibly the biggest honor: baking the cake.
But poverty and sanctions have made even obtaining the ingredients a burden — and failure to bring a cake on April 28 could mean harsh punishment. (The instructor isn’t shy about making referrals to the authorities.) The day after the drawing, Lamia and her grandmother set out for the city, a lengthy trip that requires them to hitch a ride after reaching the mainland. But once there, Lamia, with her pet rooster, Hindi, in tow, learns that she and her grandparent have different ideas about the day’s itinerary.
Much of “The President’s Cake” follows Lamia and a friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), as they scramble to procure eggs, flour and sugar around the city, a process that always seems to involve taking one step forward and two steps back. While regional generalizations are probably unfair, “The President’s Cake,” written and directed by the Iraq-raised filmmaker Hasan Hadi, has already won comparisons to child’s-eye classics of Iranian cinema like Jafar Panahi’s “The White Balloon,” another portrait of a girl dealing with intransigent, sometimes frightening adults.
But “The President’s Cake” is only superficially a story of youthful resilience. The deprivations and darkness of the dictatorship, which immiserates the Iraqi people even as it demands performative displays of happiness, lurk around every corner. When the grandmother and Lamia are separated, the police — themselves occupied with the president’s big day — are of little help. And as Lamia and Saeed barter and even steal, they navigate a world in which war violence, predatory behavior and death are routine. This is a context in which pilfering food from hospital patients can seem like innocent childhood mischief.
Although “The President’s Cake” was shot digitally, it has a grainy look that resembles film. It contains some startling sights, like lamplight offsetting the marshland waters at sunset or a nighttime drive as a storm approaches at the end of Lamia’s long day. The director is not one to over-explicate details (while the opening titles imply the film is set in 1990, the curtain rises a bit later), and is keener on texture and setting than on story. At Cannes, the film won the Camera d’Or, the prize for best first feature. It’s a striking, mature debut.
The President’s Cake Rated PG-13. Allusions to sexual predation. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.
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