Few birthday celebrations can ever match the surreal spectacle that the Iraqi state would enforce each year that Saddam Hussein would complete a lap around the sun. Since he took power in 1979, every corner of the country would be enveloped in a month-long period of celebration. One of the bizarre rituals enforced as part of the festivities was “draw day”, where schools would randomly select a student and bestow upon them the honour of bringing all the ingredients required to bake a cake for the president.
The responsibility in Hasan Hadi’s feature debut falls on the nine-year-old Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayyef) who lives in a beautifully captured Mesopotamian marshland community with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) and pet rooster. Lamia seems to fear no one more than her stern, ex-soldier teacher, so she embarks on a perilous odyssey, hunting for ingredients in the bustling streets of Baghdad.
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This is Iraq in the 1990s, a nation facing the most severe of economic sanctions and crippling food shortages. She’s faced with an impossibility, as flour and sugar are illegal, but her determination does not waver. Filtering the tale through Lamia’s childlike whimsy allows the colourful, polished cinematography to sing. The use of archival material in the film’s conclusion, then, comes as a frustrating development, for it expands the film’s narrative and ideological framework, and points it in the direction of an oversimplified view of the western hegemony that largely imposed the conditions against which it is set.