Cannes Directors’ Fortnight: ’The President’s Cake,’ Iraq’s First Film at the Festival, Wins People’s Choice Audience Award

Hailed by Variety as a “warm and heart-tugging tale,” Hasan Hadi’s “The President’s Cake,” Iraq’s first film selected for Cannes, has won the Directors’ Fortnight People’s Choice prize, the first audience award at Cannes and a Directors’ Fortnight plaudit which take into consideration any film from any part of the world.

The prestigious award builds on auspicious early major territory sales for the film, sold by Films Boutique, which bid fair for a broad international roll out. 

News of the Director’s Fortnight People’s Choice prize comes as Belgian Valéry Carnoy has won a second partner prize in the Directors’ Fortnight, scooping the SACD Coup de Cœur des Auteurs prize (literally, “One from the Heart Auteurs Award”) for “Wild Foxes,” adding to its Europa Cinemas Cannes Label for best European film at Directors’ Fortnight, announced just an hour ago. The double whammy establishes the Belgian director as a director to track.

A U.S.-Iraq-Qatar production from A Maiden Voyage Pictures, Missing Piece, Spark Features and Working Barn Productions, “The President’s Cake” is produced by U.S. producer Leah Chen Baker, whose credits include Sundance 2022 feature “Palm Trees and Power Lines.”

It counts among its 19 executive producers on Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) as well as Chris Columbus and Marielle Heller, director of “Diary of a Teenage Girl.”

What’s singular abut the film, however, critics’ agree is the knowing detail and emotion brought to the film by Hadi, who grew up in a southern Iraq of the 1990s wracked by food shortages , due to U.S.-drive sanctions. 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. 

“We had lots of offers of people saying: ‘Hey, we will fully fund this film, but we need to shoot this film outside Iraq.’ And I was like: ‘Absolutely not.’ And one of the reasons I wanted to shoot in Iraq is to show Iraq. I don’t know if you agree or not, but I think this is the first time that people will be seeing Iraq in this way, from this prism,” Hadi told Variety earlier in the festival.     

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. But the accident drains his confidence, turning an alpha-male top dog into an outcast, as he questions the violence he once glorified in. 

Sharply observed and tautly wound, say critics, “Wild Foxes” marks the feature debut of Belgian Carnoy whose graduation film “Ma planète” already won New Talent best short at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.  

“It is a sports film but without the usual predictable clichés. ‘Wild Foxes’ tackles the burning issue of young male friendship and fragility. The whole ensemble cast is exceptionally strong, and really gives the film power and believability,” a Europa Cinemas jury said. 

Sold by The Party Film Sales, “Wild Foxes” is produced by Belgium’s Helicotronc (“The Break,” “Ghost Trail”) with France’s Les Films du Poisson.