YNOT at the Movies

There are films that announce their importance loudly, and others that move with the authority of lived memory. "The President's Cake" (مملكة القصب | Iraq/Qatar/USA 2025 | in Arabic | 105 min.) belongs firmly to the latter. It is a film of hushed dread and luminous tenderness, one that understands how terror often enters daily life disguised as routine. A school assignment. A celebration. A cake.

Set in 1990s Iraq under sanctions, the film follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef) after she is selected in her class to provide a cake in honor of the President's birthday, a task that sends her across the city in search of ordinary yet nearly impossible-to-find ingredients. What begins as a child's errand quickly becomes a test of survival, as Lamia navigates markets and police checkpoints alongside her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), her loyal friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), and her pet rooster Hindi. Eggs, flour, sugar: each item carries risk, and each step forward tightens the film's grip.

Director Hasan Hadi tells an arresting story that draws deeply from personal memory. The film feels neither schematic nor didactic, but shaped by recollection and observation. Elements of myth and lived reality intertwine, allowing innocence and danger to coexist without ever canceling each other out. The world is never explained to Lamia, only endured, and that perspective gives the film its devastating power.

What makes the film so affecting is its refusal to flatten experience into political messaging. The politics are unavoidable, yet never preached. Instead, the film is devoted to ordinary endurance: how children absorb danger without fully naming it, how adults shield them imperfectly, how love and friendship persist under pressure. The cake itself becomes a fragile vessel for hope under tyranny, something almost too delicate to survive the weight placed upon it.

The performances, drawn from non-actors, feel astonishingly alive. Faces register fear, resolve, and fleeting joy with unguarded honesty. Lamia's journey unfolds as both adventure and ordeal, shaped by a sense of destiny that feels inescapable. And yes, Hindi the rooster deserves special mention: a scene-stealing presence whose perfectly timed cries puncture the tension like a living alarm bell.

Shot entirely in Iraq, the film carries the gravity of place in every frame. Locations do not serve as backdrops but as witnesses, holding history in their walls and dust. The images find beauty without softening reality.

Winner of the Directors' Fortnight Audience Award and the Camera d'Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature representing Iraq, this film is one of my top ten films of 2025: heartbreaking, mesmerizing, and indelible.

"The President's Cake" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area on Friday, February 13, 2026.