During Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, his birthday was marked every year by an annual holiday, with one child picked from every school to bake a cake for their class to celebrate.
The catch? Iraq had been hit hard by economic sanctions, and the basic ingredients you’d need to bake one were scarce to most, so being picked was a curse – and any child who didn’t bring one to class was punished. Writer/director Hasan Hadi’s debut film The President’s Cake is a coming-of-age story about Lamia, a nine-year-old from the sticks (played by newcomer Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) who sets off on a quest to the city with her school friend and pet rooster in tow to track down milk, eggs and flour after being picked.
To bring this story to life, Hadi had to break the two immortal rules of cinema with his debut: working with both children and animals. Making this even more of a challenge was his commitment to utilising non-professional actors, only increasing the struggle to discover new child stars.
“It took months to cast the movie, and almost all of these roles were street cast, so they were never auditioned in a conventional sense”, he explained to Zavvi. "I couldn’t just give a kid a script and tell them to prepare and come back tomorrow, as this was a language they didn’t understand and I didn’t want them to – there's a magic a non-actor can give you that a professional can’t.
“We did workshops that weren’t designed for acting, so much as for us to get to know each other more, and build a trusting relationship, where they could learn that there was nothing wrong they could do in a scene. It’s not an exam, if something unscripted or unexpected happened, they could react however they want, as long as they weren’t looking into the camera for my reaction!
“You can’t ask a non-professional actor to feel sad on command, as they haven’t been trained with the tools to access those kinds of emotions. But if you can give them a realistic environment and a believable scenario to explore, then you’re going to get the moment you want.”
Hadi’s lead actress was the last part cast for the movie, during the final stages of pre-production when cameras were set to roll imminently. And yet, finding a non-professional child star who could hold a drama like this on her shoulders wasn’t the biggest casting challenge.
“I had to learn the language of roosters to try and communicate with them”, Hadi laughed. “We had multiple roosters to make sure we were never at risk of overworking an animal, but there was one rooster who was the superstar that delivered on the take, and none of the others shared those talents!
“There’s a real specificity for the position roosters hold in Iraqi culture too, which is why Lamia has one. There’s a superstition that when roosters crow, it’s because they have seen a devil or an angel, so whenever you hear it talking here, that’s your warning something bad is about to happen.”
Even before people got a chance to see it, The President’s Cake made headlines as the first Iraqi film selected for the Cannes Film Festival – Hadi won the coveted Camera D’Or prize for Best Debut Feature following its premiere. Since then, the unanimous critical acclaim has only continued (it still holds a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), and it even made the shortlist for Best International Film at the Oscars, although ultimately missed out on a nomination due to it being one of the most stacked years for that category in recent memory.
Hadi’s aim was to make a movie about Iraq’s recent history for an Iraqi audience, but as he was developing the film in America – Forrest Gump and Dune screenwriter Eric Roth was an early behind-the-scenes supporter of the project – realised he needed to explain several aspects about his country’s authoritarian past in a way that wouldn’t dumb the story down for local viewers.
“When writing a script, I avoid thinking about who the audience for it is; the characters and the emotional arcs are my only priority”, he explained. “But at the same time, I realised I needed to explain some historical aspects about the effects of sanctions in Iraq, and the Gulf War context, as this happened nearly 40 years ago.
“But I wasn’t driven by that: my goal was to make a very, very Iraqi film, because I believe cinema has the power to make a specific human experience feel universal, and that an audience in Britain could find themselves having an emotional response like an Iraqi one. This film could have been made earlier, I had a couple of offers of full financing to make the movie outside Iraq, but I really wanted to make something that felt Iraqi – fully shot there, with a fully Iraqi cast.
“There’s always an accusation that if you’re from a country which doesn’t make a lot of films and must rely on international funding to get made and festivals to be noticed, that you’re not thinking about your home audience at all, which is unfair. A lot of the themes are universal enough to not need spoon feeding; this is a denunciation of dictatorships and fascism, but also very vocally against the American policies of sanctions, and I had the freedom to be able to make a bold statement.
“But of course having the support of people like Eric Roth was crucial in being able to get this movie made in the way it needed to be, and even with him on board, it still took forever to gain the momentum it needed. Whenever there was a roadblock like nobody wanting us to film in Iraq or use non-professional actors, persistence was our only path, and I believe that we were eventually rewarded for taking such a big leap of faith.
“So, with all this in mind – it's very strange to be told that I’m thinking of international audiences more than Iraqi ones. I’m an Iraqi filmmaker, and I fought to make sure this maintained an Iraqi perspective!”
Hadi didn’t set out to make a political film, even if it’s been viewed that way. His priority was making something humanist, to put faces to the names of the million children reported in the headlines of the era to have been impacted negatively by sanctions; if you see it as a “cautionary tale against fascism”, then the writer/director is happy, although he argues the core friendship is the driving narrative force.
As someone who grew up in this era – and did have a friend whose life was impacted by being chosen to bake a cake for Saddam – this is a personal project for the filmmaker, and is one of the key reasons he wanted to leave the wider social context in the background as much as he could.
“Once you dig into memories, you start questioning core moments from your childhood, and wounds that you never realised were there open up. At one point while writing, I remember being annoyed that my parents couldn’t provide me with a new pair of shoes; as soon as I thought about that, I realised the shame they must have felt for their inability to provide for their children, and it transformed my perspective.
“Understanding the pressure I was putting on my parents was a gateway to more personal things finding their way into a script which was already personal from the beginning.”
With all this in mind, Hadi is keen to stress that he didn’t want to make a dour drama about childhood poverty. Without a healthy streak of dark comedy, this movie would be almost unbearable to sit through.
“The tragedy and misery was so profound at that period, so the only way to survive was to ridicule your circumstances – if you were blind, you could just joke you didn’t need to worry about your appearance, because without humour, you’d be buried under depression to the point you couldn’t breathe anymore. It’s a defence mechanism, and a language I developed since I was a child, largely because of the paradox of the cake baking ceremony.
“Everything was rationed, but someone was forced to bake a cake for a dictator and would be punished if they weren’t. You have to laugh at the scenario because otherwise you’d despair.”
After making a splash with The President’s Cake and putting Iraqi cinema on the map, Hadi has no plans to follow things up with a splashy American production quite yet.
“I’m an Iraqi filmmaker, and there are still plenty of stories there I want to tell and show to the world – although, as a storyteller, my North Star is the story itself, not the setting, as a good story is a good story. This was a story that needed to be told in Iraq, but it doesn’t mean I’m able to tell a story from the US...”
