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“Working with Non-Actors, Children, Animals, Crowds and on Water”: Hasan Hadi on Cannes 2025 Premiere The President’s Cake
The President's Cake An autocrat forcing the populace to celebrate his birthday—where’s the novelty in that? Little children on terrifying birthday-dessert-making duties embarking on a perilous adventure in the big war torn city? Now that’s a story!
According to Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, that’s a story worth salvaging from Saddam Hussein’s reign that, along with the American wars, plagued audiences’ longterm perceptions of Iraq and its cinema. So, he decided to make his feature debut with The President’s Cake, a realistic yet fable-like narrative—a project developed at the Sundance Feature Film Program, then received an SFFILM Rainin Grant and was selected for preview at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event, where the filmmaker received the news of its selection at the Directors’ Fortnight section of Cannes.
Shot in Baghdad and the rural marshes in the south of Iraq, and set in the early 1990s—when portraits and paintings of Hussein were as ubiquitous as routine proclamations of loyalty—The President’s Cake opens with unexpected images of villagers and school children going down waterways. Their serenity is interrupted with the sight of a burning home, a peek into the slow suffering Iraqis had begun to experience during the long UN-backed sanctions period of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Two days before the dictator’s birthday, Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), a nine-year-old girl gets picked for the most feared related assignment—not bringing flowers or fruit but baking a cake from scratch and sharing it with her teacher as an autocratic offering, even as sugar, flour and eggs are astonishingly expensive and scarce. Lamia, her wise pet rooster Hindi and grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) make a journey to Baghdad where Lamia makes a shocking discovery that catalyzes an adventure with her classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a child of war eager to be reunited with his disabled war vet father.
Hadi was still laying the very final touches in the sound mix when I sat down with him via Zoom a week before the film’s Cannes premiere to discuss how this story was personal to him, his narrative and cinematic choices to showcase the sociopolitical conundrums of the region in the early 1990s, and how learned more about Lamia and Saeed during the development and filmmaking process.
Filmmaker: How was your experience with this script at the Sundance Lab in 2022?
Hadi: Sundance was the only lab I applied to, and it was amazing. The community they provide you with and the support you receive is just mind-blowing. Especially Michelle Satter [founding director of the Sundance Feature Film Program]—she’s a hero of this project and has championed it literally until now. The year I applied, the lab was in-person, and then last minute they had to cancel [because of the pandemic]. My mentors—Scott Frank, Marielle Heller, Eric Roth—were amazing. After the lab, Eric and Marielle emailed Michelle. They were like, “We want to support Hasan to make this film.” They joined the project as EPs.
Filmmaker: How did the script change under the mentorship you received at Sundance?
Hadi: When I got to the lab, the script was very well-received by my mentors. Literally, some of them said, “You should think more about how you’re going to direct this film more than how you’re going to rewrite the script.” Which is amazing to hear, but you still hear some feedback from inside you. You don’t want to hear it because you’re trying to keep it secret, but then someone says, “Oh, but it has this problem,” and you’re like, “Now someone [else] knows it too.”
In the lab, my relationship to the story changed, and it became way, way more personal, more about the characters than about plot. It became about how to develop the relationships and dynamics between the characters—somehow that actually requires more work. Then I went to the Directors Lab, which happens also in May, and shot two scenes. One was amazing; the second scene, I got lots of feedback on, and that scene changed because of that.
Filmmaker: Which scenes were those?
Hadi: The scene when Lamia tells Bibi about getting picked up had a different atmosphere [and] lines, and when I shot it, I just felt there was something missing. It was an amazing moment, and once I found that moment, it cracks something in you, and you’re like, “Now I know them more.” The other scene, I actually took it out completely, even though it was very well received, just because the dynamic of characters would have changed so much. Killing your darlings started pretty soon in my process.
Filmmaker: Are you able to talk about what that scene was?
Hadi: It doesn’t exist in the script, but it’s a scene where Saeed gets hurt in his hand, like someone cuts his hand, and later on, he sits by the water, and Lamia sits next to him, and they speak about their journey, and somehow, for the first time, Lamia explicitly tells him that she also likes him as a boy. It doesn’t work anymore with what I have now.
Filmmaker: That is quite different! I did not have that read between Saeed and Lamia at any time during your final version.
Hadi: It wasn’t a happy scene. It was very much an emotional scene, but in a way, it [was] not following the psychology of my characters. At some point you have to listen to your characters speaking to you. Hopefully, by the end, they drive you more than you drive them.
Filmmaker: The scene that you removed actually reminds me of one of the most beautiful moments in the film. Saeed and Lamia are in a cafe where there’s a singer who ropes in Lamia and they dance together. Saeed just looks at them dancing, then turns around and looks at them dancing in the mirror. There’s something so striking and rich in his look—for a moment I forgot they were kids, but they are. Can you talk more about your thinking in that scene and how it came to be?
Hadi: I hope the audience will perceive the scene the way they want, but for me, that’s the first moment I show very clearly that Saeed loves this girl, and also is jealous that she is the one who got picked for dancing with this woman and he’s just being left out. I personally really like [this scene]; even the songs in it are very personal. I think that is the only time they are literally separate from each other and we cover them differently. We give some space to get into Saeed’s mind watching her dancing, and then, obviously he turns around and cannot continue watching. Then he looks at the reflection of her dancing. We also see Saddam[’s portrait] laughing in the background, which is how it is in the film. Usually he’s either laughing or frowning, it depends on his mood or the scene.
Filmmaker: The opening credits of the film state that the film takes place around 1990 when Iran faced strict UN-backed sanctions, leading to extreme poverty and food shortages. When exactly is the film set?
Hadi: It’s the 1990s. I didn’t put a [specific] date because the sanctions [went] from 1990 until 2003. The invasion happened in August 1990, and a couple weeks later they imposed the sanctions. But I think the sanctions started to really hurt a couple of months after that, when literally even pencils were disappearing from the market. Pencils have a chemical which they were worried [would] be used for chemical weapons. Photography film was completely forbidden because they have this element in them.
Filmmaker: For a film about the lead character baking a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday, I felt all the political imagery is intentionally in the background, except for the scenes in the school where the children are loudly proclaiming their loyalty to Saddam. But one scene towards the end struck me with its more obvious political valence, when Lamia is running away from a man and ends up running into a procession with uniformed people and other citizens. The procession holds aloft a huge portrait of Saddam, and it has a garland around it, so it was apparently pro-Saddam. Can you talk about the political backdrop of this time and how you tried to showcase people’s political affiliations?
Hadi: [At the time] everyone was pro-Saddam because they didn’t have another choice. If I’m a kid at school, and someone were to come and say that everyone needs to leave to go pray for Saddam, we have to go. For Saddam, saying “No” or carrying a bullet is the same. You will be punished the same way. Definitely he was disliked, but the fear was so dominant you couldn’t speak. It’s in our DNA: you’re just born and know you cannot speak badly about this man. I couldn’t put these kinds of incidents in it because they will be unbelievable. People will be like, “This is too much.” But again, I didn’t put them because they didn’t play for my characters. By the way, during making this film, the focus was not to blame Saddam. This was a story about the numbers that we see in the papers that don’t have any story, a story for people behind those numbers. [Like the] proverb: The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of many is statistics. These people used to be statistics, and for me this is the story of one of those statistics.
Filmmaker: What is personal for you in this story? Do you relate to a particular character more? Did you ever have to make a cake for Saddam?
Hadi: Oh, I was lucky I didn’t get picked for the cake. I got picked for flowers, and my family was relieved. I [have] a photo [of[ eating with them holding the flowers; [they] all were happy because it was not the cake. I had a friend who got picked up for the cake, and his fate changed dramatically because of that. Somehow, in my unconscious, I felt like, what if this happened to me?
You asked about the personal element. There’s lots of things I share with Saeed, lots of things I share with [Lamia], lots of things I shared with my first crush. With Bibi, some of it is inspired by my grandparents and how they lived. I remember how my family struggled through this whole saga. It’s one of the most difficult things to witness as a child, that your parents cannot take care of you. That’s harsh for both parties. I think the harshest punishment for a parent would be to admit that they cannot take care of their children anymore.
That scene happens in the restaurant [in the beginning] and that restaurant [when Bibi gives up Lamia] is actually where Saddam used to eat when he was young. We chose the locations we chose very carefully to make sure they layer something in the story. For example, at the checkpoint, the building behind them is Ur, one of the oldest [buildings] in the world. The legend says that Ibrahim was saved from there, but in the foreground we see people in coffins. I like when there’s a relationship between what’s in the back of the frame and in the front of the frame. The marshes are literally the birthplace of what they call the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the first story ever in written human history. So the film, in a way, served as a visual document for me, and the country too, because we really suck at having any visual documentation of our history. Believe it or not, some of the streets you saw either don’t exist now or have changed dramatically, so I’m very happy we preserved some part of that history in a way. That’s why shooting inside Iraq was even more meaningful for me.
Filmmaker: Speaking of the marshes, I loved the opening of the film there. For whatever reason I haven’t watched a lot or any cinema from Iraq, so I just wasn’t expecting the lovely images of the waterways, and all the nighttime shots.
Hadi: I mean, the film has realism and some taste of fables in it. This was imposed by different elements in the film. One of them was location. I lived in this village that has all the houses floating on water or built on water. We go to school by a boat, we visit friends by a boat. At night, we only have this kind of lighting, so the village will look like stars in a dark night. It is like a fairy tale situation, and for me, marshes always served like that. Saddam also purposefully wanted to destroy them, but that’s in the background. No one expects that image from Iraq. They don’t know marshes exist in Iraq. Marshes are basically a desert, but full [of] water. If you look at the archival footage, it was one of the most critical [places] for birds to migrate to between winter and summer. People there live the same way they lived 5,000 years ago. I was very eager to show a side of Iraq that hasn’t been shown so often. If it’s a foreign movie, it’s usually about some soldiers, and if it’s a local movie, we don’t have the production value that we need in the frame. So for me, it was important to bring all that up.
Filmmaker: What was the most technically challenging aspect of the shoot?
Hadi: Technically, the marshes. I had a mentor who said, there are five forbiddens, especially in your 1st feature: working with non-actors, children, animals, crowds and on water. I have all of them in this feature. We practically had no lights we depended on very minimal lighting, because there’s no electricity there. The closest point to get to the ground is 40 minutes by boat. So, we had no lighting, and resetting would take so much time. If you want to give a note to an actor, you have to get on the boat, go there, talk to them, come back. So, I really learned to be patient on that on that set.
Filmmaker: So all the lighting is practical?
Hadi: 90% of it is practical. We literally had fire in every house, and we brought tons of lanterns .Obviously, we had some battery light that we used. But that was basically it.
Filmmaker: How did you find and work with your amazing child actors? I found them just so intelligent. What’s your general process with child actors, since you also worked with them on your short Swimsuit?
Hadi: In the short, I was using a lovely actress who has been trained as an actress. It’s New York—everyone is an actor or has been to acting school at some point in their life. In Iraq, it is very different. Not only do you not have any acting school, especially for children, but I’m also using a girl, which is way more way difficult to cast on screen, because we were looking for a girl from certain background, [one that doesn’t like having] their women or girls to be on the screen.
[So], it was a street casting, months and months of looking for our actors. Them being nonactors, I’ve learned from them. It was really enjoyable. Rehearsals? Enjoyable now [laughs]. At the time, I don’t know how I would describe it. I tried to avoid any real rehearsals. I didn’t want them to be “actors.” I wanted them to be [themselves]. I think I preserved that to a great degree. We did lots of exercises. We danced, spoke just to get to know them, because they’re putting all their trust in me, and they are vulnerable, but they are not actors, so they don’t have the tools to deal with that. So, it’s really a delicate balance. You want to guide them to a certain place, but you also don’t want to force them to go there. At the same time, sometimes they guide you. Sometimes, we had actors who couldn’t read and write, so the dialogue would be a different kind of animal for them to play with. At some point I had to put the script aside and just look at what the world was gifting me. It was a process that now I’m more into, but at the time, people thought I was being a bit out of my mind.
