The President's Cake

The President's Cake |  2025 | 12A | Dir. Hasan Hadi | Iraq | IMDb 7.6 | Subtitled | 105 mins

Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake continues our diverse season of films and carries with it remarkable prestige. It won the Caméra d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, a Cannes Audience Award, and a place on the Oscars international film shortlist. 

Set in Iraq in the 1990s, the film follows nine‑year‑old Lamia, who is chosen at school to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein. What sounds like a simple assignment becomes an epic quest through a country under sanctions, where ingredients are scarce. The film cleverly shows how children often carry the emotional weight of conflicts around them. 

Despite its themes, the film has a fairy‑tale tone, emerging from a blend of innocence and danger. Lamia’s journey sees her accompanied by her pet cockerel and later her mischievous friend, Saeed.

So the film has emotional depth, whilst maintaining moments of levity and charm.

A striking aspect of The President’s Cake is its cast. With no acting schools for children in Iraq, Hadi and his team searched widely for nonactors who could carry the film’s emotional truths. Their performers (especially Baneen Ahmed Nayyef as Lamia) are natural, expressive, and authentic.

Behind the scenes, the film was shaped by years of development through the Sundance Institute’s Directors Lab.  Hadi speaks of these experiences as a rare creative environment where emerging filmmakers can fail safely, experiment freely, and be guided by mentors who volunteer their time out of love for storytelling. For a filmmaker from a country with little formal film infrastructure, this support was transformative to getting the film made at all. 

The President’s Cake is the first Iraqi film to tell a story from this period of history - still vividly in our minds.  It is made entirely by Iraqi artists, shot in Iraq, and rooted in lived experience.  Hadi hopes the film will transport audiences to the 1990s marshes, revealing a world shaped by friendship, sacrifice, and the absurdity of authoritarian demands. Perhaps having some similarities to today’s egotistical / totalitarian leaders. 

Tonight’s screening offers a chance to encounter a new voice in world cinema: a filmmaker whose story is deeply personal but yet universal in its messages. It’s a film about childhood, resilience, and the strangeness of powerful regimes and how even in the most constrained circumstances, imagination and courage persist.

·       Screen 1

·       Doors open 7pm (or when Odeon staff permit entry)

·       Welcome from our chair Paula Stott @ 7.30pm

·       Free parking after 6pm if you DISPLAY an orange parking voucher, available from Odeon staff

·       Unreserved seating

·       We invite every viewer to score the film afterwards using a token system in the lobby

·      DVD available for members to borrow