The excellent Baneen Ahmad Nayyef is the star of Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake, appearing as nine-year-old Lamia. She listens to her grandmother Bibi (Waheeda Thabet) as the latter lists the ingredients for a birthday cake. Because this cake is presumably for Saddam Hussein, ruling Iraq in 1990, they go to a city nearby, presumably Baghdad. Bibi uses this trip as a ruse to leave her under the care of a bourgeois restaurant owner. Lamia runs away, making Bibi report her as missing, but she ends up in the city’s hospital. In the city, Lamia runs into her smart classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), who helps her with the ingredients. This involves dealing with untrustworthy adults like Izzat (Mohammed Rheimeh) and stealing.

Saddam Hussein looms as the obvious yet shadowy villain in this film, demanding a birthday cake from afar. Still, this follows the tradition of being a film that captures adult amorality under the perspective of children. It takes time to depict scenes between grownups trying to take advantage of each other like Izzat. Scenes like this serve as an obvious yet convincing window of the world that vulnerable children are stepping into. The children enter Izzat’s shop and he has no qualms of charging them full price for the ingredients. Although in depicting 1990s Iraq, at least The President’s Cake makes room for some kindness in strange manifestations.

Hasan Hadi, the director and writer of The President’s Cake, captures the contradictions of sanctions era Iraq. He depicts the country as one where children have to hustle to get things abundant in the West. Having only two days to help Lamia, Saeed, for example, has to sell a watch he stole to a watchmaker who knows he’s lying. Art direction also reinforces the contradictions within Iraq, a country where the Euphrates and the Tigris flow. It’s also a country with shops full of food and, in some examples, watches, yet everyone starves. The film shows plenty that either adults hoard or, in the best of ways, the wrong kind of plenty.

The President’s Cake, again, follows a few traditions of world cinema as a sort of national metaphor. It captures a nation that corrupts on a personal level, where even children start to become terrible people. A birthday cake, and Lamia’s desperation to get its ingredients, gets her to steal and eventually, to jail. The film depicts the little people getting in trouble despite the system pushing them towards making bad choices. Aside from the art direction, the cinematography here shows crispness and silhouettes, a child’s colourful world darkens. Despite that darkness, elements, including Nayef’s performance, show that there are moments of hope and kindness out there.

Film lovers can watch The President’s Cake in select Canadian theatres.