The President’s Cake turns a girl’s forced gift to Saddam into Iraq’s Oscar contender

A girl crouches at the foot of a roadside shrine in the Iraqi desert, tending not a grave but a portrait: Saddam Hussein, one arm raised, painted larger than the wrecked car rusting beside him and the woman in black walking the empty road behind her. Hasan Hadi frames the image in a washed, oceanic blue, and it says almost everything about the world of The President’s Cake before a line of dialogue. This is a country flattened under one man’s face, where even an open desert road carries his likeness and a child has already learned to make her small offerings to it.

The film’s engine is an errand. Every school in the country has been ordered to bake a cake for the president’s birthday, and Lamia, nine years old, is the pupil chosen to produce one. In a landscape stripped by war and embargo, where sugar, flour and eggs are luxuries that have all but vanished from the shelves, the assignment is not a celebration but a threat. Fail to deliver and the consequences fall on a child and the family around her. The cake becomes a small, absurd, immovable demand placed on someone with almost no means to meet it, and the movie simply follows her attempt to scavenge a way through.

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Hadi builds the film around non-professional actors, and that choice is the argument. Baneen Ahmed Nayyef plays Lamia with the unguarded directness of a child who has not learned to perform for a camera, and her face does work that a script about totalitarian fear could easily have over-explained. Waheed Thabet Khreibat, as the grandmother the family calls Bibi, gives her an anchor: the generation that knows exactly what the cake means and cannot say so aloud. Sajad Mohamad Qasem fills out the small circle around her as Saeed. The absence of recognizable stars is not a limitation here. It keeps the camera at a child’s height and refuses the gloss that would make the ordeal go down easily.

It is Hadi’s first feature, and it arrives carrying unusual weight for a debut. He is the first Iraqi filmmaker to compete in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and the project passed through the Sundance Institute’s development labs before reaching the screen. The Baghdad-rooted director has been open that the film draws on the texture of the sanctions years rather than reconstructing any single headline event. Its politics arrive obliquely, through a shortage of eggs and the casual omnipresence of a leader’s image, never through speeches. That is the historical claim the film makes: that dictatorship is felt first as a logistics problem in a child’s kitchen.

Visually the film keeps faith with that idea. Hadi and his cinematographer work in a muted, sunbleached palette of dust-grey roads, the bruised blue of early light, interiors lit as if electricity itself were rationed. Propaganda iconography keeps returning as landscape, in murals and portraits and slogans painted on concrete, all of it weathering under the same heat that wears down the people beneath it. The compositions hold still and let the child move through them, so that the regime reads less as villain than as climate: something in the air, unremarkable and inescapable.

The cake itself does a great deal of quiet symbolic work without ever being underlined. It is at once a tribute demanded by power, a luxury the economy can no longer produce, and a child’s craft project freighted with adult stakes, an object that must be perfect for a man who will never see it, made by people who can barely feed themselves. Hadi lets that contradiction sit. The film is less interested in Saddam Hussein as a character than in the way his birthday reorganizes a whole town’s scarce resources around a single gesture, the way a state converts affection into obligation and obligation into fear.

What the film does not do is pretend its fable can carry the entire decade it gestures toward. The quest-for-ingredients structure risks sweetening a period of mass deprivation into something a festival audience can leave feeling moved rather than implicated. The child’s-eye frame, so precise at registering fear, also softens the adult calculations of complicity and survival happening just past Lamia’s understanding. And the momentum the film now carries, the prizes and the shortlist, guarantees attention without guaranteeing that a deliberately small story can hold the expectations being stacked on it. This is a debut, with a debut’s seams.

The principal cast of Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, Sajad Mohamad Qasem, Waheed Thabet Khreibat and Rahim AlHaj was drawn largely from non-professionals, and the 106-minute drama is an Iraqi-Qatari-American co-production. Its festival run has been emphatic: a world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won both the section’s Audience Award and the Caméra d’Or for best first film, followed by selection as Iraq’s entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature and a place on the category shortlist, the first Iraqi title ever to reach it. Sony Pictures Classics opens it in U.S. theaters in limited release on February 6 before expanding from February 27, 2026, with Curzon releasing it in the United Kingdom from February 13.

Tags: drama, Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, Hasan Hadi, Sajad Mohamad Qasem, The President's Cake, Waheed Thabet Khreibat

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