In December 2025, The President’s Cake was shortlisted for the 2026 Oscars in the Best International Feature Film category. This honour is a big cherry on the much-acclaimed debut film by Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, including the prestigious Caméra d’Or that it won at the Cannes Film Festival for Best First Feature this year.
Set in 1990s Iraq during the Gulf War, when the country was reeling under poverty, international sanctions, and Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule, the film is inspired by Hadi’s own childhood experiences. The narrative follows nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef) who is chosen to bake a cake to mark her school’s mandatory Presidential birthday celebrations. The near-impossible assignment sends her on an unenviable adventure, along with her friend, grandmother, and her pet rooster, to hunt for the ingredients in a climate of fear and scarcity.
At the recent Doha Film Festival, the film was screened to a rousing reception. Soon after, we sat down with Hadi for a freewheeling chat.
Excerpts from the interview:
In your film set more than three decades ago, children clearly are victims of the war. We see the same cycle repeating today. How do you see it?
Indeed. Be it Iraq then, or Gaza or Ukraine now, it’s clear that children, without a choice, are victims of war. I guess what my film also shows is how time and again, humanity has failed to come up with effective solutions for conflicts. For instance, I don’t know of any country where sanctions took down a dictator. Instead, sanctions enable dictators because they take total control of the limited resources and its selective distribution to the people. It’s the commonfolk who have no other choice than to submit and do what they are asked of. When people read or think about sanctions, they see it as a very harmless, diplomatic tool. But it’s so violent and dehumanizing, turning the affected people into mere numbers. My film is an attempt to humanize such people.
The film explores universal themes and yet manages to avoid the usual Western gaze that focuses on suffering and sorrow. Did you strike this balance consciously?
Honestly, my north star was exploring and conveying my experience. I was part of this story because this happened to me during my school days — I was tasked with getting flowers while my friends had to bake a cake (for Hussein). So I’m not looking down at the events or the characters. My perspective was only to look at them. It’s really strange that we need to say today that those from war-torn regions are people, too. They are not sub-humans. They are people, like any of us.
What were the challenges of shooting this film in Iraq?
We don’t have a cinematic crew in Iraq. So we had to bring in some foreign crew to help us. But even then, I wanted this film to be the medium that helps evolve the skill of local Iraqi talents. So even if we had a non-Iraqi head of department, we always had an Iraqi crew under them so that they could be trained and taught new skills. Also, we don’t have modern-day acting schools, especially for children. We were working with non-actors. The camera gear to shoot this film – Alexa 35 – didn’t exist in Iraq. That said, we could access and shoot in locations that anywhere else would have cost thousands of dollars. Like, the checkpoint scene was shot near Ziggurat Ur, which at around 7,000 years old, is the oldest building in civilization.
Although the storytelling and the technical finesse are far evolved, it’s still your debut feature film. What lessons in filmmaking or storytelling did this process reveal to you?
What I learned and applied was more collective. It took us three years to make this film. It took us around 50 days to shoot it because we were working with children, so we had to limit ourselves to a fixed number of hours. Working with non-actors helped me train my instincts and to trust them. When I was presented with 10 costumes for Lamia, I somehow knew that she needed to wear which one. We held a workshop for the children – Lamia and her friend Saeed – but not for acting rehearsals. It was to help build their equation so that their friendship in the film appears very organic. Also, the idea was I get to know them, they get to know me, and we could build a trusting bond. Knowing them also helped me adapt certain scenes by drawing from how they are in real life. It’s a vital insight to make the characters of the non-actors as close as possible to them in reality. So there are elements in the film that are inspired from their real life. Everything started with me just wanting to write the best story I could write. That was my only goal. I didn’t care about the budget or following or breaking any filmmaking rules. So all the narrative elements became organic to the core story. That could be a big reason for the film’s success.
