For Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, winning the Camera d’Or for best first feature at last month’s Cannes Film Festival was not just an acknowledgement of a gifted Arab talent, it was a historic event that put Iraqi cinema on the world film map.
His debut feature, The President’s Cake, the first Iraqi film shown in Cannes, is that rare Arab picture; a moving, gripping, fable that envelopes its pointed politics with magical realism deeply rooted in Iraqi mythology.
“I was on stage [in Cannes] and [the 2025 Iranian Palm d’Or winner] Jafar Panahi turned to me and said ‘I won this award thirty years ago and it was very difficult for me to make a film after that’.”
Comparisons to early Panahi (The White Balloon) and Kiarostami (Where Is the Friend’s House?) are legitimate, but make no mistake: The President’s Cake is a singular work in its own right.
Hadi’s confident debut is one of the outstanding Middle Eastern films of the year, and unquestionably the greatest Iraqi film produced thus far.
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The director sets the surreal tone of the picture from the get-go. The otherworldliness of a striking-looking marshland and a few ambling boats is interrupted by a couple of helicopters.
We pan to the right to reveal a long line of families queuing up at a mobile water tank with a man shouting: “Fresh water, a gift from the president.”
This contrast between the ethereal and the austere permeates the entirety of a picture that habitually moves between the fantastical and real.
It is the Iraqi marshland in an unidentified year in the early 1990s. The country is reeling from the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council in the wake of the first Gulf War, which led to colossal inflation and unemployment.
We’re promptly introduced to Lamia (astonishing newcomer Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), a genial, soulful nine-year-old schoolgirl living with her elderly grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), in a modest house.
Despite grueling economic conditions, the nation’s notorious autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein, continued to force his people to celebrate his birthday on 28 April, with each school class tasked to make a cake for the Ba’ath party leader.
‘Sanctions are a form of terror. You’re terrorising people by cutting off their food and medications and their livelihood’
– Hasan Hadi, filmmaker
Having recently been laid off from her farm work, Bibi urges Lamia to avoid being tasked with making the cake because she cannot afford the ingredients.
Lamia tries to be absent when the annual draw that will designate the responsibilities for the president’s banquet takes place, but she ultimately fails and is given the foreboding task of making the cake.
Tetchy and covertly helpless, Bibi escorts her granddaughter to the nearest city to buy the flour, sugar, and eggs – all expensive and not readily available – needed for the cake.
The ailing and worn-out Bibi has other plans and soon, Lamia flees her clutches as she ventures to collect the ingredients herself with the aid of her devoted cockerel and her best friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem).
Thus begins an odyssey into the broken soul of Iraq – a nation ravaged by the twin evil of brutal economic sanctions and an egomaniac leader no longer in touch with his people.
Unwavering goodness
Throughout her journey, Lamia encounters a multitude of characters: the kind hearted mailman who handles the president’s adulatory letters; the soldier left blind by an American missile who readies to marry a bride he has never seen; the grocery shop owner who agrees to help the children to help seduce a customer sympathetic to their cause, and the pedophile shopkeeper plotting to take advantage of Lamia.
Hadi paints a stark, if never oppressive, portrait of a dog-eat-dog world with fizzling morality, a zombie-like nation on life support.
His political commentary is pronounced, finding no difference between Hussein’s megalomania and the West’s casual ambivalence towards Iraqi civilians.
At the beginning of the film, Bibi quotes a line from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest surviving attested story that originated in Ancient Iraq.
“God told Gilgamesh: ‘Look into the water, and you shall see your loved one. And God promised those with pure hearts shall see the image of their loved one in the water’.”
The line not only imbues the proceedings with mythical tint but prepares the viewer for an atypical depiction of an Iraq: a multifaceted culture deformed and oversimplified by the western narrative.
Lamia’s journey defies the conventions of coming-of-age stories. The soulfulness of the resourceful schoolgirl does not get tarnished; the callousness she encounters does not change her.
Lamia’s determination does not waver; the city cannot wipe out her belief in goodness.
Like the referenced water in Gilgamesh, she preserves the purity of her heart with magic, with comradeship and love.
But like most Iraqis, she’s worn-out, and this weariness pervades the end of her journey and its heartbreaking conclusion.
Coming to America
Hadi’s own journey to realise his cinematic dreams was no less Herculean than his heroine.
Growing up mostly in Baghdad, Hadi studied Business at the American University in Beirut, a degree he earned “for my parents,” as he put it.
His passion for film started in the early 1990s with smuggled VHS tapes of everything from Godzilla to Bruce Lee, which he could only watch on his small TV set after his parents went to sleep.
Studying film was incomprehensible in a country that didn’t have any functioning theatres from 1990 through to 2008.
‘Not only do you get into one of America’s top schools, but you get a full scholarship, but that wasn’t enough for them to give me a visa’
– Hasan Hadi, filmmaker
He eventually left his safe career behind to pursue filmmaking. In 2015 he recieved a full scholarship from the NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts – the alma mater of Martin Scorsese, Ang Lee and Spike Lee.
However, for no reason other than his Iraqi nationality, he was denied a student visa for three years in a row.
“Not only do you get into one of America’s top schools, but you get a full scholarship, but that wasn’t enough for them to give me a visa,” Hadi said recalling the experience.
NYU does not usually defer admission, but thanks to programme chair, Barbara Schock, the school deferred the director’s admission for those three years.
“Every year when I was rejected the visa, I got told by everyone, ‘this is not meant to be; maybe you’re not meant to get into this business’,” he said.
Hadi burnt all bridges with his previous work, refusing to give up on his dream while simultaneously realising that the comfort of his former career was no longer attainable.
By the third visa rejection, the NYU faculty started to doubt that Hadi’s scholarship may ever materialise.
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Hadi decided to give the visa a fourth and final shot. The consulate officer informed him that an administrative process is required for the visa to be processed, which could take anything from one day to six months.
But after three years, Hadi finally received his visa. However, as he was preparing to leave for New York in 2016, Trump hit Iraq with the notorious travel ban.
“I was fully convinced this was not meant to be,” Hadi said. “It was difficult to process. You start blaming yourself, your country, your identity. ‘Maybe we are indeed fucked up,’ I thought to myself.”
A day before Hadi was due to leave for NYC, Trump lifted Iraq, and only Iraq, from the list.
“Maybe he knew I suffered that long,” Hadi laughed.
Hadi describes New York as a “cultural scene I never encountered before. Film theaters showing old films? [Russian master] Tarkovsky on the big screen? Romanian New Wave? DVDs you can watch in screening rooms? It was mind-blowing. It felt like a candy shop,” He said.
“Working with talents from around the world made me realise how my perspective was narrow.”
How sanctions broke a nation
Hussein’s birthday cake was a relic from Hadi’s childhood that never left him – an emblem of the sanction years that have never been tackled in cinema before.
“When you break a man – a teacher, a governmental employee – they never become the same again no matter what. This is what happened to the entire society,” Hadi said.
“So imagine you’re a teacher, you earn $800 a month – which was the average salary of teachers in the 1980s– and you go from planning for nice summer vacations to being unable to purchase a pack of eggs.
“People at the time sold everything they had just to survive. Teachers forced students to take private lessons by being terrible in class and making exams very difficult.
“They compromised their integrity to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the students forced their parents to take bribes in order to afford those lessons.
“It was one gigantic vicious circle enveloping the entire society. As Dostoevsky wrote in Crime and Punishment, you feel guilty with the first one you kill. But after that, you feel pleasure because more planning goes into it; because what was stopping you from doing that is broken now.”
Hadi believes that the Iraqi’s current ailments – corruption, illiteracy, shoddy healthcare, industrial collapse – are rooted in those years of sanctions.
“The sanctions were more harmful than the American invasion. The invasion was… you kill, you leave. Sanctions are the most violent tool imposed on ordinary citizens. When your parents can no longer provide for you; when you’re forced to do things you’re not comfortable doing, something changes inside you forever,” Hadi said.
“Sanctions are a form of terror. You’re terrorising people by cutting off their food and medications and their livelihood.”
“Iraq survived the Iran-Iraq war. The economy remained strong; education was still top-notch. But look at Iraq after the sanctions.
“Look at Syria and Iran after the sanctions. Sanctions never remove dictators; on the contrary, they empower them because you limit the resources people can have access to and you give them to the most powerful. Saddam became a lot more powerful after the sanctions.”
Loving Saddam
“I came quite close to being entrapped in Stockholm Syndrome,” Hadi said when I asked him about his perception of Hussein growing up.
“My parents never sat down and instructed me on how I should talk about the president. It happened organically; we just knew.
“It was simply part of our DNA. We knew he was bad, but no one could speak about him. With time though, you start rationalising his behavior; that maybe he’s doing those things to protect you; because they are the bad people.
“You start finding excuses for his behavior, simply to live.”
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One striking facet of The President’s Cake is how blatantly amoral some of its characters are.
In particular, Lamia’s teacher, who is based on a real character, flaunts his connection with the regime, unabashedly revealing that he’s a state informer who has punished, and will continue to punish, any student who refuses to fall in line.
Hadi’s Iraq is a place mired in distrust, decadence and opportunism.
“We had wives reporting on their husbands; husbands reporting on their wives; children reporting on their parents; parents reporting on their children,” Hadi said.
“The whole society was turned into informers. [The Baathist regime] turned people against each other, and people ratting on one another became so widespread.”
Most actors in the film are non-professionals; many of whom were playing themselves.
What’s remarkable about Hadi’s characters is how open they are about sex and religion; Hadi’s Iraq is worlds apart from the conservative place the West has always seen it to be.
“Iraq is certainly significantly more conservative now – a byproduct of wars and poverty,” Hadi said.
“In 1991, there was a revolution against Saddam. George H. Bush encouraged Iraqis to topple him. Nearly all cities fell into the rebels’ hands as a result.
“But then the US feared that the country would turn into another Iran and decided to give Saddam fighter jets and helicopters,” Hadi said.
“So after he squashed the rebellion, Saddam launched the ‘The Faith Campaign’ which introduced Wahhabism to the country for the first time.
“ In 1998, he thought the new faithful were becoming too much so he decided to kill a lot of them. It was totally fucked up! But that’s how the country became religiously conservative, along with the rise of Islamic parties in 2003.”
Draining the marshes
A key component of the film’s visual structure is the palpable disparity between the folkloric marshlands, with its vast, tranquil meadows and waters, and the bustling city with its archaic alleyways, nooks and ceaseless commotion – a contrast between the fabulism of the marshlands and the realism of the city.
“The marshlands are an integral part of Iraqi identity. People lived there the same way they lived 7,000 years ago,” Hadi said.
“I wanted to take the audience on a journey to an Iraq they’ve never seen before. I don’t think people thought that Iraq had so much water.”
The President’s Cake in that sense is a love letter to the Mesopotamian marshes, the Iraqi natural wonder that was drained and destroyed by Hussein as a punishment for the role of the Ahwari tribes in the ill-fated 1991 uprising .
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“It was one of the greatest environmental crimes,” Hadi said.
“After 2003, they returned the water to what has become a desert. The villagers who left were already accustomed to the comforts of the city and refused to go back. There are people who live in the marshlands now, but it’s not like what it used to be.”
Early in the film we see fire eating up houses, and people leaving their homes, in a nod to the time when Hussein poured salt in the water to drive the villagers out.
These striking moments may go over the heads of the international viewers, but for Iraqis, the burning marsh houses carry a lot of memories, meaning, and trauma.
Contrary to the vast majority of the Iraqi films produced this century, which relied on a combination of limited local money and the habitual European funding, The President’s Cake took an untraditional route for financing, amassing its budget from Iraq and American private equity.
The inclusion of Eric Roth – the iconic Oscar-winning writer of Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Dune Part 1, and one of Hadi’s mentors at the Sundance Lab – in the film’s production team boosted its profile, eventually helping it to land a much-publicised US distribution deal with Sony Pictures.
‘I wanted to take the audience on a journey to an Iraq they’ve never seen before’
– Hasan Hadi
The President’s Cake is the first Arab film Roth has supported and it is now in pole position to land an Oscar nomination next year.
The US may have been a primary antagonist for most of the Middle East, yet Hadi credits the support he was given from various institutions like NYU and Sundance and artists like Roth for realising his film.
He also acknowledges that the freedom he was given in America, even in the repressive Trump years, remains absent in the Arab World.
“If I went to Arab country and told them that their president is fucked up or talked about justice or international student protests, it wouldn’t take an hour for me to be either deported or put in prison,” Hadi said.
