‘The president’s cake’: a story of Baghdad beneath the carpet of historical past | Cinema: premieres and opinions | EUROtoday

The president’s cake It locations us within the loss of life throes of the primary Gulf War, in the beginning of the nineties. According to an introductory textual content, worldwide sanctions have plunged the Iraqi individuals into shortage however, turning his again on actuality, Saddam Hussein requires a collective effort to have fun his birthday. We are on April 26, two days earlier than the anniversary. Forced by this grotesque mandate and fearing that the regime will punish her household, Lamia, a nine-year-old lady, walks the streets of Baghdad seeking the elements for a cake that’s, as you’ll be able to think about, bitter.

Camera d’Or on the final Cannes pageant for finest first movie and viewers award within the Directors’ Fortnight, the movie by Hasan Hadi—a 37-year-old Iraqi who lived via the dictatorship, sanctions and battle earlier than finding out in New York—turns Lamia’s adventures right into a metaphor a few individuals punished on all fronts; whether or not it’s the whims of the satrap or the hardships brought on by those that supposedly got here to save lots of his individuals.

Lamia’s odyssey begins and ends at college, the place the helplessness of probably the most harmless and the hole with a corrupt grownup world is made express. It is inevitable to search out in The president’s cake traces of Italian neorealism and, above all, of the filmmaker who rewrote the style with incomparable poetics: the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. Its shadow is lengthy and the primary echo comes from certainly one of its masterpieces, Where is my buddy’s home?one of the lovely movies within the historical past of cinema. Like this one, that one confronted the bravery of a kid with the incomprehension of the grownup world.

But if Kiarostami’s elegant and complex cinema says all of it with the minimal, with out avoiding probably the most terrifying and darkish shadows that stalk childhood, Hasan Hadi errs on the aspect of extra and a few straight sordid brushstrokes. Also to underline greater than crucial the social and political context of the story however with out guaranteeing decisive battle particulars within the story very clear in its chronology.

Even so, The president’s cake She has energy in her gaze and in lots of her pictures: above all, in these of that lady (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) clinging to her lovely red-crested rooster whereas she walks together with her grandmother and her schoolmate via the streets of Baghdad seeking eggs, sugar, flour and yeast for worry of punishment from her trainer. The lovely rural panorama of the movie, crossed by the Tigris canals, and the no much less suggestive city panorama of Baghdad flip this story of childhood survival right into a fable whose magical flight is price enterprise with the assistance of the cussed Lamia. And by the way in which, keep in mind that the victims are all the time the identical, from one particular person to a different.