The President’s Cake: ‘sweet tragedy’ about a little Iraqi girl on a baking mission

“There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The task sounds innocuous enough but, because the country is in the grip of sanctions, every single ingredient that nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) might use to make her cake is near-impossible to come by. Undeterred, she and her pal Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) set off to find what they need and, along the way, they meet a string of “vivid characters”, from a “grocer who gives rare treats to a pregnant customer in exchange for sexual favours” to a postman who helps them, declaring cake “the greatest invention in human history”. The film “saunters and meanders along” but, throughout, placards and posters of Saddam pop up, “as if to spoil every happy moment and intensify every sad one”.

At times, the mood of this “sweet tragedy” of a movie is almost larky, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times: Lamia travels everywhere with her cockerel, Hindi, for instance, who is a bona fide “star”. But the actress’s “small, grave face” – she has never acted before, and is superb – is the film’s soul. In this Iraq, not every adult is a monster but fish rot from the head down, and the evil of the president is catching.” At once “a road movie, a magic realist fable and an incisive portrait of the seldom-seen Iraq of the 1990s”, this film feels “distinctly Iraqi”, said Joseph Fahim in Sight and Sound. To its director’s credit, it never slips into “misery porn” but is instead infused with humour, even as it shows how its characters’ transgressions “are inseparable from their declining society”.