Film

Iraqi Oscar Shortlisted Tragicomedy’s Sweetness Belies Empty Calories

5 February 2026

Even if you didn’t catch the Caméra d’Or winning The President’s Cake at Cannes this year, it’s likely you’ve already seen the likes of it before. Hasan Hadi’s debut feature, which has been shortlisted for Best International Film at the 97th Academy Awards, is a child-led, social drama of the Italian neorealist tradition, which takes place inside a land degraded by economic sanctions and Western military incursion. The problem is that the film’s trappings are rote, and seemingly built for the festival circuit that is celebrating it. It is, in other words, made for Western eyes, as evidenced most clearly by its anachronistic portrayal of an Iraq that seems more like post 2003 than the early 1990s in which it is set.

If that seems like a limited way to judge such a thing, take the fact that everyone and everything in the film, from the nooks and crannies of the unnamed cityscape nine year olds Lamia and Saeed traverse, to the children themselves, are compromised by the fraying social infrastructure they live in. Though the film is packed with beautifully shot, well-realized period specifics and admirable performances, all of its goodwill is countered by non-specificity, where the Iraqi countryside could be supplanted for any underdeveloped, depleted economy.

That isn’t to say the film doesn’t have its distinct pleasures. Lamia, precocious, witty and sharp as a tack, is brought to rich textured life by Banin Ahmad Nayef; the young actor carries the filim with her tenacious, increasingly desperate spirit. Through her journey, the film contains a bleak comic irony of living under a despotic regime – one just wishes the depiction of that system was attributed correctly or historically accurate. Nonetheless, Hadi’s movie balances on a tightwire of unusual tonal shifts. Lamia’s race against-the-clock through urban life, the result of being given the “honor” of baking a cake in honor of Saddam Hussein’s birthday, would be funny if it weren’t so tragically real.

The President’s Cake begins as the fog of war is lifting, for now. After Operation Desert Storm ends, Hussein’s Iraq becomes a battlefield for American soldiers facing an Iranian-back uprising in its stead. Cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru lifts his camera over jarringly beautiful marshlands as everyday folks look for food in a time of great scarcity. Lamia’s parents have died, and so is raised by her grandmother, whom she calls Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat). In this land where kids travel to school via canoe and teachers are soldier-like loyalists to the state, The President’s Cake takes shape as a contemporary One Hundred and One Nights fairytale without allegory.

The price of eggs being what it is and poverty being as widespread as it is, the “honor” of baking a cream-filled cake is more of a death sentence; the last family to get assigned the task failed to do so and were dragged through the streets “like dogs.” In desperation, Bibi takes Lamia to the city to get ingredients – though, really, she plans on pawning off her granddaughter to a family of better means. Instead, Lamia runs away and reunites with Saeed, who is pickpocketing at a theme park with his father, as Bibi frantically runs through a city she somehow knows quite well, yelling at the police to take this missing person’s case seriously.

In spite of some of the darker set pieces with heavy implications – like a butcher who seems friendly, at first, but turns out to be a pedophile – The President’s Cake has an almost comic touch. That’s admirable, if for no other reason than Hadi does work hard to steer away from the pitfalls of award-baiting neoliberal claptrap that this very easily could have become. Yet, it is hard to say what all this is for if not to please the same good-conscience westerner who would rather blame Middle Eastern instability on a singular tyrant than their own country’s obvious complicity.

Hadi does give voice to the constancy of the American presence in the region, no more so than in the film’s startling final moments, but the bulk of the runtime is too acidic. The real problem with Hadi’s innacurate portrayal of recent history is that it allows us to collectively abscond with our relative innocence, since Iraq has, more or less, never recovered post 2003. Without this knowledge, The President’s Cake is a genuinely enjoyable portrayal of youthful heroism and resilience. With it, the film inadvertently goes down like a flavorless dessert.