Iraqi director Hasan Hadi’s poignant but heartwarming drama The President’s Cake world premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes in May and has been winning fans ever since.
The film won the Caméra d’Or for best first film across the Official Selection and parallels sections, as well as the Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award and was snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics soon after.
Set in the tail end of President Saddam Hussein’s rule over Iraq and at the height of sanctions provoked by the invasion of Kuwait, the film taps into Hadi’s own childhood experiences.
The drama follows Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), an impoverished 9-year-old who is picked to bake a birthday cake to celebrate the president’s birthday. It’s a near-impossible task amid the sanctions, but failure to deliver could lead to prison or death for her family.
Hadi reveals that the story is inspired by the fate of one his childhood classmates, who was picked to make the cake in real life.
“He failed and got expelled from the school and then got recruited to Saddam’s children’s army,” the filmmaker said during Deadline’s Contenders Film: International panel. “His destiny completely changed, and that really haunted me, even into adulthood.”
Hadi studied is an alumnus of the Grad Film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and developed the feature with the support of the Sundance Lab before returning to Iraq, where he now is living.
He revealed that it was suggested to him that he shoot the film outside of Iraq, which still is prone to sporadic violence, but that he stuck to his guns to film in the country.
“I was very much willing to gamble. … Stories have identity, have DNAs, have roots,” Hadi said. “And this story was very much rooted in the marshes of Iraq, in the south of Iraq, in Baghdad. … I also wanted to break this stigma about Iraq, which is perceived in a very certain way in people’s minds.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.