For those of us still in the afterglow/afterburn of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival world of cinematic wonder, the spirit of having “seen the world” through film still lingers. That spirit continues to have a regular home at the SBI FF screens at the Riviera and the McHurley Film Center, including the uniquely impressive Iraqi film The President’s Cake.
Part of the buzz about this alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking child’s-eye story is the rarity of its source country. For one, it was the first Iraqi film to screen at the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious “Director’s Fortnight” and has been lavished with glowing critical praise. And yet the film is anything but an esoteric or edgy film experience. It almost qualifies as an accessible, “bring the family” brand movie (“movie” versus “film”) while also proudly being blessed with artful crafting.
Writer-director Hasan Hadi has created a chronicle of a nation in the grips of a harsh regime and reality, but a tale leavened by the absurdity of a despot’s whims and a sly humor, embedded in the film’s very premise and title. The film takes us to Iraq in 1990, after the Kuwait conflagration had resulted in U.S. bombs on Baghdad, and the seeds were sown for our “WMD-” driven war waged in 2001. We feel the atmosphere of sanctions-imposed desperation and subservience to the despotic Saddam Hussein, who, despite his country being in dire straits, demands his 50th birthday be honored with a nationwide bounty of birthday cake presentations. (Actual footage of Saddam’s birthday celebration, with “happy birthday” performed creepily on repeat, is a tragicomic touch in the film).
Our young heroine, Lamia, has been tasked by her stern teacher with making a cake for the occasion. Her misadventures and run-ins with dubious characters in Baghdad, while clutching her cherished rooster Hindi, are related both to searching for cake ingredients and dodging her grandmother’s eviction of her. It’s a simple, deceptively simple, almost fable-like storyline tucked into a broader canvas of Iraqi life under a dictator’s fickle rule. Young actress Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, part of a cast of largely untrained actors, is a powerful emotional center of the film, with her sad yet determined persona.
Beyond the empathetic storytelling approach at work in the film — enhanced by the built-in poignancy of the child’s innocent perspective — it is a smartly made piece of filmmaking. Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru does remarkable work, attentive to the luster of individual compositions and sequences while attending to the propulsion of the story. There are small moments of wonder, such as an extended shot of two children crouching under their school desk during an American bombing raid, exchanging glances implying a rapprochement between them. Music is used in just the right degree, with selective passage of the ideally indigenous sound of Rahim AlHaj’s solo oud.
Ultimately, the film works on various levels, especially as a ground-level, human-pitched story in a still fairly mysterious country — to Westerners — which we were once supposed to fear as an enemy. If The President’s Cake had been on the SBIFF 2026 program, it would have been one of the program’s cherries, international division.
