‘The president’s cake’: a tale of Baghdad under the carpet of history | Cinema: premieres and reviews

The president’s cake It places us in the death throes of the first Gulf War, at the beginning of the nineties. According to an introductory text, international sanctions have plunged the Iraqi people into scarcity but, turning his back on reality, Saddam Hussein calls for a collective effort to celebrate his birthday. We are on April 26, two days before the anniversary. Forced by this grotesque mandate and fearing that the regime will punish her family, Lamia, a nine-year-old girl, walks the streets of Baghdad in search of the ingredients for a cake that is, as you can imagine, bitter.

Camera d’Or at the last Cannes festival for best first film and audience award in the Directors’ Fortnight, the film by Hasan Hadi—a 37-year-old Iraqi who lived through the dictatorship, sanctions and war before studying in New York—turns Lamia’s adventures into a metaphor about a people punished on all fronts; whether it be the whims of the satrap or the hardships caused by those who supposedly came to save his people.

Lamia’s odyssey begins and ends at school, where the helplessness of the most innocent and the gap with a corrupt adult world is made explicit. It is inevitable to find in The president’s cake traces of Italian neorealism and, above all, of the filmmaker who rewrote the genre with incomparable poetics: the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. Its shadow is long and the main echo comes from one of its masterpieces, Where is my friend’s house?one of the most beautiful films in the history of cinema. Like this one, that one confronted the bravery of a child with the incomprehension of the adult world.

But if Kiarostami’s elegant and sophisticated cinema says it all with the minimum, without avoiding the most terrifying and dark shadows that stalk childhood, Hasan Hadi errs on the side of excess and some directly sordid brushstrokes. Also to underline more than necessary the social and political context of the story but without making certain decisive war details in the story very clear in its chronology.

Even so, The president’s cake She has strength in her gaze and in many of her images: above all, in those of that girl (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) clinging to her beautiful red-crested rooster while she walks with her grandmother and her schoolmate through the streets of Baghdad in search of eggs, sugar, flour and yeast for fear of punishment from her teacher. The beautiful rural landscape of the film, crossed by the Tigris canals, and the no less suggestive urban landscape of Baghdad turn this story of childhood survival into a fable whose magical flight is worth undertaking with the help of the stubborn Lamia. And by the way, remember that the victims are always the same, from one person to another.