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THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE. HASSAN HADI
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"Yes, they would execute a child": the film about a girl who has to bake a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein
Warm, funny and heartbreaking, The President's Cake tells the story of a brutal ruler and a girl forced to make him a present in a time of sanctions-induced hardship. Its Iraqi director Hasan Hadi remembers his own fearful childhood
There were no cinemas in Iraq in the 1990s, when Hasan Hadi was growing up under Saddam Hussein's regime. But he still managed to fall in love with films - after a family member roped him into helping her distribute VHS tapes of banned foreign movies. "I was a kid," says the 37-year-old, "so no one would suspect me of smuggling. I'd put the tapes up my shirt or in my bag."
Hadi started secretly watching the films, too, everything from Bruce Lee to Tarkovsky. At night, he crept into the living room after everyone had gone to bed, keeping the volume low in case his family woke up.
How, I ask, would the authorities have punished you if you'd been caught in possession of banned films? Hadi pauses. "It depends. There were no specific rules. But if it was a political film, or something really forbidden by the regime, it could go to execution." They would execute a child? Hadi nods. "We're talking about a period when childhood lost its innocence."
Hadi's own film, The President's Cake, is about to be released. Warm, funny and sometimes heartbreakingly sad, it perfectly captures the innocence of childhood. The setting is early 1990s Iraq: Saddam's brutal rule and the hardship of sanctions are seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl called Lamia, played by Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, with her pet cockerel. She is the unluckiest kid in class, her name having been picked out of a hat, meaning she has to make a cake for the president's birthday - a compulsory national holiday in Iraq...
BY Cath Clarke
