All hail Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, which I saw this morning at 8:45 am. It’s EASILY the best Cannes ’25 film thus far…EASILY.
The only thing that scares me is that I saw Netflix’s Albert Tello at the screening, and it would be awful if Netflix were to capture this jewel of a children’s adventure film and bury it in their streaming feed. Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term, and it needs to be seen theatrically….please. It’s my idea of an instant classic — all but guaranteed to be nominated for a Best Int’l Feature Oscar.
I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.
Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).
The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.
And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.
Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.
Nayef and Qasem are not only perfect in a way that only non-actors can be, but they blend together beautifully.
The brilliant cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and the nimble editing by Andu Radu are genius touches.
Eric Roth and Marielle Heller helped bring Cake to life from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab. Roth: “It’s a small miracle…dear Hasan has a poet’s soul…in this too public business of absorbing the blows of outrageous fortune, Cake is that sweet taste of honey.”
Chris Columbus and Michelle Satter also pulled strings on the film’s behalf.
A U.S. distribution deal is presumably imminent, but please, God…please don’t let it be picked up and smothered by Netflix.
