The President’s Cake began with a memory by Iraqi director Hasan Hadi of a ritual from the latter days of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Every year the teacher drew lots to determine who in the class could delight the president – or himself – with a gift: flowers, fruit, soap, decorations, a cake. In the 1990s, a birthday cake was the most expensive chore. Where did you find ingredients in this poor, despotic country that was in a tense semi-conflict with the powerful US?
In The President’s Cake the nine-year-old girl Lamia is screwed. Grandma Bibi could no longer care for Lamia and took her from her village to Baghdad to give her granddaughter up for adoption. The enterprising Lamia angrily runs away with her rooster Hind under her arm, makes an alliance with pickpocket Saeed and joins him in Baghdad to look for ingredients – eggs, flour, sugar and baking powder – for a presidential cake.
The President’s Cake evokes a vanished time by following the foraging children through Iraq during the waning days of the Baathist regime, where children march through schoolyards with slogans such as “Hail to our leader Saddam Hussein, we sacrifice our souls to you!”
Swamp delta of water and reeds
Laima takes her cake so seriously that she allows street urchin Saeed to trick her into free-range theft: this is the only way she can achieve anything in this anthill of hustlers and scammers, rude cops and hysterical demonstrators, sometimes over which American fighter jets screech. Lamia experiences small adventures: saving the rooster Hind from a chicken thief, keeping away from a pedophile slimeball, and a poetic postman goes looking for her. There are hints of a much grimmer reality just beyond her perception – when, for example, she ends up in a police station full of scared, crouching detainees.
Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as Lamia, with her rooster Hind in ‘The President’s Cake’.
Photo September Film
Only through free-range theft will she achieve anything in this anthill of hustlers and scammers, rude cops and hysterical demonstrators
Sometimes such a film idea floats above the waters, it seems. It went wrong at the Cannes Film Festival last year The President’s Cake also the movie Amrum premiered, where twelve-year-old Nanning searches for ingredients for white bread with honey on his Wadden Island in 1945 to get his mother out of her depression now that her idol Hitler has died.
In the magical-realistic world of both children, everything remains the same if they succeed in their mission. Enter Lamia The President’s Cake and Nanning Amrum both do their pathetic best, but have to learn that you cannot turn back the clock, that the world is indifferent to their magical interventions. And so you grow up, sadder and wiser.
A simple story, but it opens en passant The President’s Cake a colorful, unknown world: dusty Baghdad, the ancient swamp delta of water and reeds, enchantingly illuminated with oil lamps. This Iraq is certainly not a lost paradise, but it is still something that the film looks back on with some nostalgia when the American invasion emphatically presents itself in the finale.
