Mandatory Grief

There is a scene in The President's Cake where a nine-year-old girl named Lamia sells her dead father's watch to buy flour, eggs, and sugar. She needs these things because her school drew her name in a lottery that mandates she bring a cake to celebrate Saddam Hussein's birthday. The penalty for arriving empty-handed is unstated but understood. The film is built on the weight of what is never said.

The premise sounds like a fable out of the realm of reality. Lamia lives with her ailing grandmother Bibi and a beloved rooster named Hindi in the Mesopotamian Marshes. This is a world of extreme poverty, reeds and water. Bibi and Lamia go to the city with all the belongings they hope to exchange for cake ingredients, and the story takes a lot of unexpected turns at that point most of them dark, a few of them tender, none of them predictable.

The movie brought to mind Bicycle Thieves where a child, a city, an errand that becomes an education. But The President's Cake is unlike any movie I've seen. Shot entirely in Iraq with mostly untrained actors, it has an atmosphere that is uniquely its own. The Mesopotamian Marshes give the film's opening a mythic, timeless quality, which makes the city's cruelty land harder. Hasan Hadi understands that authoritarianism is most visible not in its monuments but in the way a stranger calculates risk before offering kindness, in the way an entire city goes about the serious business of a dictator's birthday while the lives of ordinary people is falling completely apart.

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef as Lamia is absolutely spectacular. A critic from Baghdad argued the film trades in familiar images of a suffering Iraq for Western consumption, and that critique deserves an honest hearing. But it does not undo what the film achieves, which is to locate the full machinery of political oppression in something as ordinary as a shopping list. The cake is absurd. The cake is also everything.