Few smiles and many tears in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

In 1990, in an Iraq battered by UN sanctions, Lamia, a nine-year-old girl living in the wetlands, is tasked with baking a cake for her school's celebration of the anniversary of the nation's supreme leader, Saddam Hussein. Faced with food shortages, the girl, accompanied by her grandmother, travels to the city in search of ingredients. This premise allows Hasan Hadi, an Iraqi director trained in New York, to transform The president's cake in a textbook social drama; that is, a collection of episodes ranging from grim to downright sordid, illustrating a reality marked by militaristic fanaticism and a profound moral crisis.

To construct his one-dimensional fresco, Hadi –winner of the Caméra d'Or for best debut work at the past Cannes Film Festival—gathers a collection of valuable cinematic legacies, all linked by the common thread of portraying a childhood innocence torn by the shadows of the adult world. Thus, The president's cake It is reminiscent of neorealist films such as Bicycle thief and Germany, year zeroand also to the treatment of creatures in cinemaAbbas Kiarostami and Jafar PanahiHowever, the powerful human resonance of this cinematic lineage – which vibrates in the delicate face of little Baneen Ahmad Nayyef – is crushed by Hadi's insistence on underlining social denunciation through an incessant accumulation of calamities.