There’s a surprise in store even within the opening shot of “The President’s Cake” when director Hasan Hadi pans over from a river bank to the land where residents are waiting in line with buckets to bring back water to their homes, using the widest lens he can find to show that the gap between great bounty and poverty isn’t all that great and yet still insurmountable in the time in which his moving debut is set during the early 1990s in Iraq. More specifically, the bittersweet drama unfolds two days ahead of President Sadaam Hussein’s birthday, an event that consumes all the resources of the nation but isn’t much of a cause for celebration to most, particularly a nine-year-old named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), who subsist largely on the generosity of others to provide them food, but are tasked with baking a cake in the president’s honor in a local lottery at Lamia’s school.
There is evading the mandatory sweepstakes despite Lamia’s best efforts when Mr. Musa, the soldier put in charge of third grade, runs the class with an iron fist and saw to it that last year’s “winner” had his family punished when coming up short with a proper pastry. If Lamia can take any comfort in her name being drawn from the till, it’s that Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), her best friend in the class, has also had the bad luck of being picked for the nearly as impossible task of bringing a bundle of fresh fruit to the party, and although the two initially set out on their own to collect the food, they end up depending on one another when their guardians are sidelined because of their health. While Lamia’s grandmother escorts the child into the city, it’s with the ulterior motive of setting her up with new parents who could take better care of her, an idea that sends Lamia running, and Saeed has to leave behind his handicapped father when the two are accused on the boardwalk of being thieves and only one of them can escape the clutches of the cops.
With portraits of Hussein looming large everywhere Lamia and Saeed traverse, the tyranny of his reign doesn’t only appear inescapable, but Hadi is able to show exactly what he presided over when pristine paintings of the leader on billboards and hanging in homes and businesses overlook the havoc he wreaked, whether it’s the heavily wounded patients at the hospital where Lamia’s grandmother is sent to stay or the markets Lamia and Saeed end up trying to get the ingredients they need and see others desperately bartering around them when dinars can be dismissed as forgeries and it’s questionable that the real currency still has any value to begin with. It’s a mark of Hadi’s cleverness in general that it’s notably easier for Lamia to acquire eggs than any sugar and the writer/director slyly puts her and Saaed on a path that allows for a panoramic view of Iraqi society under authoritarian rule without feeling forced or heavy-handed as the kids are hardly the only ones facing impossible odds in accomplishing even the most menial of everyday chores.
The fact that Lamia can’t get her hands on any sugar hardly means that the film itself isn’t quite sweet, with channeling the children’s innocence in its own perspective and featuring utterly disarming and poised performances from Nayyef and Qasem that make the adventure a joy to watch even when what’s happening to them is tragic. The characters around them can occasionally feel a bit too broad to be believed when the kind-hearted mailman that brings Lamia and her grandmother into the city devotes himself fully – and perhaps improbably – to finding the young girl upon their separation and the kids cross paths with a pair of lecherous men whose ugly, if only inferred, behavior seems at odds with the genteel tone that the film generally strikes. However, as Lamia comes to learn from a stripped-down recipe, sometimes keeping it simple yields the most delicious results and in sensitively showing the pain inflicted by a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a child, there ends up being plenty to celebrate in “The President’s Cake,” just not the guest of honor.
“The President’s Cake” will screen again at the Cannes Film Festival as part of Directors Fortnight on May 23rd at 11 am at the Theater Croisette.