The President’s Cake is a 2025 Iraqi drama, written and directed by Hasan Hadi (his directorial feature debut). It had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and was released in the UK last Friday, 27 February.

The film is set in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the early 1990s, following the invasion of Kuwait and the American led liberation of that country some seven months later. Immediately following the invasion, economic sanctions had been imposed by a number of western countries and these stayed in place for over a decade. The action takes place over a three-day period from 26 April to 28 April, although the precise year is not specified. So how do we know the exact dates, I hear you say? 28 April was Saddam Hussein’s birthday, and in order to celebrate this, each school was required to select one pupil to bake a birthday cake.

The film follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) who on 26 April, two days before the President’s birthday, is unlucky enough to have her name drawn out of the hat as the pupil responsible for baking the cake for her tiny school. She lives in abject poverty in the Mesopotamian Marshes with her grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreiba). Their poverty would have meant that the price of the ingredients would have been unaffordable at the best of times but, at the height of sanctions when food is scarce and prices exorbitant, the task is nigh on impossible.

However, failure if not an option and so, the following day, Lamia and Bibi set out for Baghdad with their few possessions, a watch and a transistor radio, to attempt to barter them to rustle up the money for the cake ingredients.

I would like to report that this is a beautiful story about triumph over adversity, and in some ways, it is just that; it is a story about good people in difficult circumstances. However, it is also a story about evil: the evil that is ever present in Hussein’s regime, the specific evil of sexual predators, and the potential for casual evils present within ordinary people. It is also a stark reminder that imposing economic sanctions hurts the poor people of a country much more than its rulers.

Nayyef’s performance is wonderful and Hadi’s down-to-earth unsentimental storytelling works extremely well. I look forward to his next film.

The President’s Cake at times makes for uncomfortable viewing but is a warm and generous piece of filmmaking that will stay in the memory for a long time.