Growing up and making movies in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: “International sanctions destroyed us, they never affect dictators but their people” | Cinema: premieres and critiques | EUROtoday

Every April 28, Iraqis took their braveness and, regardless of the numerous worldwide sanctions that suffocated them, took to the streets to rejoice the birthday of the dictator Saddam Hussein. “Now it seems crazy, but that happened: once in schools they forced us to make a cake for the president. And I remember a friend and classmate who couldn’t find the ingredients to cook it. We barely had enough to eat, enough to find sugar and make the cake for the president,” remembers now the 37-year-old filmmaker Hasan Hadi, who wrote a script about that painful expertise, and has managed to shoot his movie, The president’s cake, which is now premiering in Spain after profitable the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the award for finest first movie in any part of the French competition.

Hadi grew up in southern Iraq, in the identical terrain of marshes and poverty during which his movie takes place. “The president’s cake “It is based on my fears as a child and on my questions as an adult,” said the filmmaker last September at the San Sebastian competition, where his drama was screened in the Perlak section. His own life is marked by the desolate future of his nation. In his childhood he never set foot in a movie theater, because they did not exist. But he did see a multitude of films on videotapes. “A relative convinced me to help him in his VHS distribution business for foreign films. prohibited. I was a child, so no one suspected me. It seemed impossible that he was a smuggler. “I would hide the tapes under my shirt or in my bag.”

In alternate, he watched numerous films on the small household tv. From Godzilla to movies by Roberto Rossellini or Jackie Chan. And he received a scholarship to review movie at New York University. However, the immigration restrictions of Donald Trump’s first presidential time period made his arrival within the United States not possible for 3 years. “Finally I was able to develop the script under tutorship at the Sundance Institute, where I received the support of filmmaker Marielle Heller (Can you ever forgive me?) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), who even put money out of his pocket. “That’s the only way I managed to film. Consider that it hasn’t been filmed in my country for a long time.” And even less so in the south: his film contains very powerful images of canoes and river houses, fascinating sunsets with lantern lights… “We tried, although we were always subject to the fact that our protagonists were children. They rule.”

For this reason, the camera never loses sight of the protagonist, Lamia, a nine-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother, and whose life becomes complicated little by little as she searches for the ingredients for her cake, to the point of traveling to Baghdad for sugar. “Lamia’s fears are my fears. What would have happened to me if they had caught me with the video tapes? There were no clear rules. Furthermore, it depended on the film that they found you hiding. If it had been a political film, a title expressly prohibited, they could have even executed me. Yes, I was a child, but I remind you that we are talking about a time when childhood lost its innocence.”

For Hadi, his film has an immediate echo in events taking place in various parts of the world. “Children are not political, they have no bias, they are innocent and they simply show you the world as it is. What is happening now, the expansion of dictators and their fascism, is the same thing that happened in the nineties. Democracy is not just holding elections. You cannot have a true democracy without freedom of expression,” he argues.

Hadi managed to get out. In 2021 his short Swimsuit He made enough noise for many people to notice him, who had already moved to London. And so he avoided the temptation to film in Jordan or Morocco. “It didn’t make sense. It must have been there, with Iraqis. And between November and April, because the rest of the year the heat is infernal.” The last push was given to him by a director a priori far from auteur cinema: through a contact from Sundance, one day, Hadi ended up speaking on Zoom with Chris Columbus (director of the first two Harry Potter and of Home alone). “It turns out that he loved the script, and after the talk he ended up going into production with his company, Maiden Voyage Pictures.” Hadi’s face lights up when he recounts this checklist of helps and the thrill that made him win the Golden Camera: “I used to be left clean. Anyway, after the second, I do know that the awards assist to boost the subsequent undertaking. And that’s my purpose.”

back to The president’s cake. “I did not wish to make a political movie. Yes, worldwide sanctions are a part of the background panorama of the movie, as a result of they destroyed us, as a result of they by no means have an effect on the dictators, however quite their folks. But I do not wish to launch messages, I wish to inform tales, and that is the story of two youngsters. I’ll movie once more in Iraq, most likely with actors discovered on the road, as a result of there is no such thing as a performing college.” And what occurred to his schoolmate? Finished the cake? “He didn’t make it, he was expelled from school and recruited into Saddam’s children’s army.”