One of the breakout features at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight earlier this year, Hasan Hadi’s directorial debut The President’s Cake picked up the section’s Audience Award and the Caméra d’Or. Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics, Iraq’s Oscar entry will now have an awards-qualifying run beginning December 12 at NYC’s Village East and LA’s Laemmle Monica Film Center, followed by a theatrical release on February 6. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “While people across 1990s Iraq struggle to survive the war and food shortages, the President requires each school in the country to prepare a cake to celebrate his birthday. Despite her efforts to avoid getting picked, 9-year-old Lamia is chosen among her classmates. The young girl must now use her wits and imagination to gather ingredients and prepare the mandatory cake in THE PRESIDENT’S CAKE.”
Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “Hasan Hadi’s Cake premiered in Directors’ Fortnight and won the audience award. Then, at the closing weekend, it was given Cannes’ coveted Camera d’Or for best first feature from a jury headed by Alice Rohrwacher. This would be a remarkable achievement for any film, let alone the first to represent Iraq in the festival’s long history. Hadi is New York-based these days (he works as an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch) but the story is drawn from personal experience of that time––particularly the ritual of celebrating Hussein’s birthday, which was compulsory for every citizen, regardless of means or U.S. sanctions. It’s a situation the film approaches with downbeat humor. One small part of this involved drawing names in the classroom, with the least-lucky student having to provide a cake. Fail to deliver and the consequences would be drastic.”
See the trailer below.