“Three eggs for fertility, one kilo of flour for life, 500 grams of sugar for a sweet life and baking powder for a fluffy cake.” In Hasan Hadi’s debut feature The President’s Cake, the anatomy of a dessert is spoken with the weight of an incantation. Each ingredient carries the shape of a promise and a small hope for the future. But in 1990s Iraq, where even the most ordinary rituals of the home are subject to Saddam Hussein’s regime, such promises are quickly eclipsed by power and greed.

Set amid the economic devastation of 1990s Iraq, The President’s Cake follows nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), an Iraqi schoolgirl chosen by drawing lots at school to source ingredients for a cake. The deposition of this burden, however, is not unique to her alone. Each year on April 28, students are selected to bake in honour of Saddam Hussein, binding even a child’s errand to the rituals of dictatorship. Under Hussein’s regime and the sanctions that deepened everyday suffering, flour, sugar and eggs were no longer ordinary staples and became scarce, precious goods, turning the simple task of finding them into a struggle for survival.

The search for these ingredients sends Lamia on an impromptu journey alongside her classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) and a rooster named Hindi. Their encounters with a string of eccentric strangers give the film much of its dry, dark humour, yet Hadi never lets those lighter moments slip free of the regime enclosing them. Throughout the film, Hussein’s face is plastered in countless frames—from posters, placards and truck backs alike—turning every public surface into a reminder that nothing in this world sits outside the state’s reach.

That reach is felt most cruelly in the way the film renders deprivation. Set against a backdrop of poverty and rationing, flour, sugar and eggs cease to be simple, obtainable ingredients. Their ordinariness only underscores how thoroughly everyday life has been hollowed out. By following Lamia’s search for these ingredients, Hadi captures not just material hardship but also the way in which prolonged deprivation distorts the world around her. The adults she encounters are not merely unhelpful, but indifferent to the point of cruelty, treating her exhaustion as incidental to the task she has been forced to carry. There is something deeply harrowing in watching a nine-year-old wear herself down over what should be the most forgettable of chores.

For all its political weight, however, The President’s Cake works because Lamia never feels reduced to a symbol. Nayyef is undoubtedly remarkable, with her performance, among others, being one of the film’s greatest strengths, alongside Hindi the rooster proving to be an unexpectedly perfect counterpart. Even more notable is Hadi’s refusal to allow Lamia to become a mere stand-in for suffering. He preserves her innocence without romanticising it, letting her composure sit in stark contrast to a world defined by appetite, opportunism and fear. In doing so, he captures a child’s experience of dictatorship in all its confusion, indignity and absurdity—allowing the film to stay anchored in lived experience rather than abstraction.

Thus, it is the refusal to abstract Lamia’s experience that gives the film its lasting force. Saddam Hussein is no longer spoken about with the same frequency as many other historical tyrants, and Hadi’s film feels partly intent on reopening that conversation. Rather than treating dictatorship as an abstract political condition, he shows how state power presses into everyday life, through hunger, exhaustion, humiliation and the grotesque demand that the starving honour the man responsible for their starvation. By the end of the film, you are left with the rare sense of having briefly inhabited somebody else’s reality. It is meticulously crafted, bittersweet and deeply attuned to the way power infiltrates the most ordinary parts of daily life.

The President’s Cake is in cinemas from April 2.