

The little girl repeats her grandmother’s directions as she writes down the recipe.
“Three eggs for fertility,” she says. “One kilo of fliur for life. Five hundred grams of sugar for a sweet life. And baking powder…for a fluffy cake.”
Because in 1990 Iraq, no one dares not bake “The President’s Cake” for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. His name and his photo are everywhere, because that’s what dictators do. His birthday, April 28, is a national holiday, celebrated under the dire international sanctions and air raids of the run-up to the Desert Storm invasion that coming summer.
Writer-director Hasan Hadi’s film — titled “Mamlaket al-qasab” in Arabic — is a child’s picaresque quest to round up the ingredients for that mandatory baked good for the mandatory party set to take place after the mandatory street rallies and marches.
“With our blood and with our souls,” the people chant (in Arabic with English subtitles), “we sacrifice ourselves for Saddam.” And so some 50,000 Iraqis did.
But Hadi’s debut film, which was shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar this year (it didn’t make the final cut) finds sweetness and even humor in a child’s eye view of repression and the life-or-death consequences of living under an outlaw military dictatorship in a place where there’s oil the more developed world wants.
Hadi immerses us in the riverfront lives of nine year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and her “Bibi” (granny, played by Waheeda Thabet). Life’s basics aren’t easily had as price hikes hit the poor the hardest.
Lamia’s mustachioed martinet of a teacher (Ahmad Qasem Saywan) reminds one and all that he can “turn your whole family in” and make you disappear if you don’t toe the line. As he draws lots to determine who will bring the fruit, who will clean the classroom and who brings the juice, Lamia learns the value of prayer. She gets chosen to take on the ruinously expensive cake.
“I prayed, but it didn’t work.”
She takes her pet rooster Hindi and joins Bibi as they row their canoe up to a spot where they can hike to the road and then hitchhike to the city.
Her bestie Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) is already there, but his quest involves picking pockets for his one-legged war-vet dad. Still, he’s a handy kid to know when it turns out her broke, exhausted granny has brought Lamia here to give her to another family. No cake burden, and her fascist teacher can stuff it, or it’s closets Arabic equivalent.
Lamia flees and she and Saeed have a day of encounters both friendly (a helpful mailman played by Rahim Al Haj) and fraught, as the military is everywhere and ignores “peasants” only when it’s not interested in repressing them, and the city is full of thieves, hustlers and pedophiles.
A pot-bellied grocer sexually bargains with a very pregnant young woman over her bill. Stall-operators in the bazaar are threatened with eviction and pass on their irritation to would-be customers.
Money changes hands, but is it real or “forged?” The bakery the kids flash cash to declares it “forged” and takes it and keeps it. They’re just kids, after all. What can they do?
And Hindi the rooster is constantly under threat from thieves and butchers.
Young Nayyef makes a fine embodiment of an innocent in the big city, learning the take-or-be-taken ethos and how useless an unchallenged military police is at everything other than hanging Saddam posters.
“You think you’re the president’s daughter?”
Hadi lets us fear for her, for Saeed, her Bibi and her rooster. And even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking “The President’s Cake.”
Rating: PG-13, sexual situations, children imperiled, profanity
Cast: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem and
Rahim AlHaj
Credits: Scripted and directed by Hasan Hadi. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:44



























