The President’s Cake may very well be described as a Center Japanese remake of The Wizard of Oz. On this model, Dorothy’s obtained a pet rooster as a substitute of a canine, and the Depraved Witch is Saddam Hussein. The sun-bright street is now treacherous marshland and the heroine is attempting to keep away from dying, not discover a approach house. It’s an understated drama that’s tender and chilling in the identical moments and, as these moments develop, surreptitiously riveting.
The Story
Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) lives in a thatched hovel with Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), the grandmother she adores, and her rooster, Hindi. She fortunately will get to highschool day-after-day by rowing herself in a canoe. However as we speak she isn’t as carefree as she’d like.
Yearly, in each college, there’s a ‘draw day’ in preparation for Saddam Hussein’s birthday celebrations. College students are randomly chosen to contribute what are, by sanction-hit Iraq requirements, luxurious meals gadgets for the annual celebration. Of specific concern is the baking of a President’s Cake. Cake components are far past the attain of households that dwell in poverty and wrestle to eat in any respect.
The Downside
When the draw second comes, Lamia and her classmates all maintain their breath as the primary title is named. Then the second; then the third. It appears Lamia’s prayers have been answered till the final announcement, when her world crashes. She’s the one who’s been given the ‘honor’ of baking the President’s Cake.
The Joker
The silent narrator on this movie is the Joker, who factors out the absurdity of an unhinged despot issuing a nationwide mandate that each one residents should rejoice his birthday. It’s an childish order however, if disobeyed, punishable by dying. Bibi is especially aware of Hussain’s grisly brutality and, when she will get the ‘cake information’, is consumed with worry. She decides she’s going to should make drastic plans with a purpose to shield her younger cost.
The Joker resumes his sideshow when the customary bedraggled urchins are changed by silk-clad youngsters as they march by the streets, singing their tyrant’s reward. Because the procession proceeds, Bibi leads Lamia right into a retailer to purchase her a brand new college uniform. The uniform is three sizes too huge, however Lamia is grateful for the present and has no suspicion that that is a part of Bibi’s covert plan. However, inside minutes, plans, hopes and the story itself are turned on their collective head.
The Riot
Lamia has grown up in a suffocating world of tyrannical management. Oppression overwhelms and dissent is taboo. However, regardless of all this, when the second comes, she chooses defiance over subservience. It’s a perplexing and plausible twist that questions what it’s that really defines us. And for the viewers, it’s a pure balcony second.
Like Dorothy, Lamia meets many archetypes alongside the best way, lots of whom are much more scary than skeletal-faced bushes. And as if this nine-year-old’s load wasn’t heavy sufficient, her odyssey is about in opposition to a backdrop of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm aerial assault.
However as dramatic as warfare is, for Lamia and the scholars on birthday-dessert obligation, hostilities on the bottom outgun something a US bomber can drop.
Launch Dates
THEATRICAL
February sixth, 2026 – restricted
February 27th = extensive
STREAMING
To be introduced
Distributed by Sony Footage Classics
Written & Directed by Hasan Hadi
Interview With Hasan Hadi
This story comes from my childhood reminiscences rising up in Iraq throughout Saddam’s time. Yearly, our trainer would stroll in with a bowl and ask us to throw our names into it. He would then draw the title of the scholar liable for baking the President’s birthday cake and offering different gadgets—fruits, decorations, cleansing provides, and flowers.
One 12 months, I used to be picked to be the flower boy. I nonetheless have the photograph of me holding the flowers someplace in my library, and I bear in mind my household’s aid as a result of all I needed to deliver was flowers. In fact, on the time, sanctions had made corruption so widespread that you can escape the draw in the event you supplied the trainer a service—fixing his bike, giving him a haircut. You then’d survive. However in the event you couldn’t, your possibilities have been slim.
For my first function movie, I needed to deal with a topic, world, theme, and characters that I’m aware of. I used to be decided to develop these reminiscences into a movie about that interval in Iraq—depicting the day by day actuality of its folks, however above all, celebrating the ability of affection and friendship. We’ve got one thing in Arabic referred to as “Maktoob”, that means “it’s written” or “future” which actually means that you could’t escape sure issues as a result of they’re written on you. The writing course of didn’t take so lengthy. I knew the world and the characters that I used to be writing about. I knew that the movie would have a style of fabulism and pure realism in it.
Ultimately, I consider I arrived at a draft that I assumed was able to be shot, however as we began the pre-production and scouting for our solid, I nearly put the script apart and surrendered to what the world was giving/gifting me. At one level, I felt making this movie was like driving a wild horse: if I let the horse and the circumstances management me whereas making this movie, then it could be a catastrophe; and if I attempted to completely management and limit how the horse would run, then it could throw me off its again and I might’ve utterly failed making this movie.
So it was a fragile stability between accepting what the world is supplying you with and use that to profit your story and let it breathe life into my script. That is the primary Iraqi movie to deal with this vital historic interval.
