★★★★★
There are tyrants who demand monuments, and tyrants who demand cakes. The President’s Cake understands that the latter can be just as lethal.
Set in Iraq in the 1990s, under Saddam Hussein and the weight of Western sanctions, Hasan Hadi’s debut feature reduces dictatorship to a child-sized task: nine-year-old Lamia must bake a mandatory cake for the president’s birthday, or face being dragged like dogs. Flour. Eggs. Sugar. Simple words that become impossible objects.
From that premise, the film unfolds as a darkly comic odyssey through scarcity, fear, and moral erosion; a journey that feels uncomfortably timely in an era where strongmen are again repackaging cruelty as order.
Lamia (a remarkable debut from Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) lives with her grandmother Bibi in the Mesopotamian Marshes, where water is precious, and groceries are rarer still. When Bibi paddles the Tiber, her small boat is buffeted by the wake of passing speedboats.
The film moves like a parable with teeth. Each time Lamia and her friend Saeed get closer to the ingredients, another obstacle arrives: corrupt officials, predatory adults, indifferent systems. The cake becomes a classic McGuffin; not because it matters, but because power has decided it must.
There’s a moment when Bibi is asked to describe Lamia to police sketch artists. She says simply: “Big eyes.”
Those eyes carry the film. They absorb hunger, fear, comedy, and quiet resolve. Nayyef’s performance has the breakout force of Slumdog Millionaire’s child leads; expressive without sentimentality, tough without losing wonder.
Hadi stages the film with fluent, often mischievous energy. There are flashes of The Death of Stalin style absurdity, where bureaucracy becomes grotesque theatre. Police are uninterested in missing children but deeply invested in birthday logistics. Adults barter, leer, threaten, shrug.
The comedy goes very black. You will laugh, then immediately feel uneasy for having laughed. That tension is the film’s strength: it refuses to let humour soften the violence of the system that produces it.
Visually, the film avoids polish. Shot entirely in Iraq, using mostly untrained actors, The President’s Cake is populated by faces that look lived-in, tired, opportunistic, frightened. This is not Hollywood’s airbrushed misery. It feels closer to something glimpsed on a news broadcast, except here, the camera stays long enough for humanity to return.
The film has landed to rapturous acclaim, winning both the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, and much of that praise is deserved. It is expertly made, emotionally precise, and devastating in its small details.
But it is not beyond critique.
The screenplay was co-written with American screenwriter Eric Roth, and at times, you can feel the risk that comes with that perspective. The film leans into familiar images: corrupt, obese officials; greedy traders; sex-crazed men circling vulnerability. Moral goodness is scarce. Almost everyone encountered is compromised.
For viewers with limited knowledge of Iraq, this could reinforce old prejudices: the idea of a society flattened into dysfunction, awaiting rescue or judgment from outside. That discomfort is sharpened by the historical context: Western sanctions are present, but American complicity remains largely off-screen.
At a time when authoritarian impulses are resurfacing globally, The President’s Cake reminds us how power really works: by outsourcing its cruelty to ordinary people, by turning survival into compliance, by making celebration compulsory while water runs out.
You will hope, fiercely, for Lamia. For Saeed. For the rooster Hindi.
The President’s Cake doesn’t ask you to admire its politics. It asks you to look closely, uncomfortably, into a pair of big eyes, and remember what systems do to children when no one is watching.
The President’s Cake opens nationally in cinemas from 2 April 2026.
It previously screened in January 2026 at Perth Festival.
Website: https://rialtodistribution.com/film/the-presidents-cake/
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/rialtodistributionau/
Watch the trailer here:
Film details:
Title: The President’s Cake
Director: Hasan Hadi
Cast: Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, Sajad Mohamad Qasem, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Rahim AlHaj
Country of Origin: Iraq, USA, Qatar
Duration: 102 mins
Rating: M
