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Cannes Directors’ Fortnight: ’The President’s Cake,’ Iraq’s First Film at the Festival, Wins People’s Choice Audience Award
The prize is announced as Belgian’s Valéry Carnoy’s ‘Wild Foxes,’ takes the SACD Prize, his second award at Directors’ Fortnight.
Set in the Mesopotamia marshes, it turns on Lamia, 9 (Baneen Ahmed Nayyef, “in an impossibly soulful performance,” says Variety), who gets picked at school to bake Saddam Hussein’s birthday cake and sets off on an odyssey with best friend and neighbor Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), getting aside the nearest city to secure materials for the cake. “Hadi’s film has the makings of a commercial arthouse winner, filled with observant period details in its lived-in production design — the organized chaos of the roads, the dust in the air, all the Saddam-related signage and so on,” Variety said in its review. Packing a powerful performance from France’s Samuel Kirchner, who scored a promising actor Cesar nomination for Cathérine Breillat’s “Last Summer” (2023) plays Camille, the best young boxer an an elite sports academy, who sustains minor injury from a fall.
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