THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE (MAMLAKET AL-QASAB) Discovery

Premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Hasan Hadi’s striking debut made history as the first Iraqi feature screened in the sidebar, winning both the Audience Award and the Caméra d’Or for Best First Feature. Inspired by Hadi’s own childhood experiences and set in 1990s Iraq under UN sanctions and Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule, THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE follows nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef) after she is randomly — and despite her best efforts — selected for the ostensible honor of baking a cake to mark her school’s mandatory Presidential birthday celebrations. This seemingly simple assignment is made nearly impossible by a scarcity of ingredients and constant climate of fear. With her formidable grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and pet rooster Hindi in tow, Lamia ventures from her marshland village to the city on an odyssey to hunt down sugar, flour, eggs and baking powder. Separated from her grandmother along the way, Lamia continues the quest with classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), who is faced with a similar command to source encounters an array of colorful characters and situations along the way, Hadi blends humor and absurdism with grounded realism and an astute political awareness, juxtaposing moments of levity with constant reminders of the systemic repression surrounding his young protagonists. A tender and tragicomic coming-of-age tale with an incredible sense of time and place, Hadi’s infinitely accessible debut — which counts Christopher Columbus, Marielle Heller and Eric Roth among its executive producers — inevitably draws comparisons with the child-centered work of Abbas Kiarostami, while firmly establishing its own compassionate, grounded and bold voice. –Abbie Algar