Hasan Hadi, Iraq’s first filmmaker to be selected for the prestigious Cannes Festival, said economic embargo on his childhood under Saddam Hussein did not work.
“The sanctions empower the dictators,” he told AFP, while concentrating scanning resources in their hands and only make them “more brutal.”
“In the history of the world, there was not only once in which (they imposed) sanctions and the president could not eat.”
Hadi’s first feature film, “The President’s Cake”, has received very good reviews since he premiered on Friday in the fifteen days of directors.
The film’s deadline said it was “Head and Shoulders above” some of the films in The Running for the Festival’s Palme d’Or prize, and “could be the first Iraq candidate for an Oscar.”
The film follows Lamia, nine years old, after the school teacher selects her to bake the class A cake for the president’s birthday, or be denounced for unfair.
It is in the early 1990s, the country is under paralyzing sanctions of the UN. She and her grandmother, with whom she shares a reed house in the Marshs of South Iraq, can barely afford to eat.
While they were heading to the city to hunt unasquible ingredients, with the Lamia pet cockerel and its last belongings to sell, the film immerses itself in social reality, and the corruption of everyday day, of the 1990s, Iraq.
The almost total trade and the financial embargo imposed on Iraq after Kuwait invaded “demolished the moral fabric of society,” said Hadi.
He sent to the country “hundreds of years.”
– ‘Sell your by by frames’ –
The filmmaker said he did not prove the cake until he was in his adolescence, after the invasion led by the United States in 2003 knocked Saddam and lifted the sanctions.
On the other hand, with the processed sugar and the eggs out of reach, there was a “cake dated”, whose main ingredient had crushed dates, sometimes with a candle at the top.
“When I was a child, you are sad that you are not receiving your cake,” he said. But as you grow up, you realize what your parents should have happened to put food on the table.
“Not only my family, but all these people had to literally sell everything,” he said. “There were people who only sold their frames through.”
Hadi and his team filmed the movie completely in Iraq.
The old wetlands in the south of the country are beautifully captured, list a world heritage site since 2016 and allegedly the home of the Biblical Garden of Eden.
Saddam drained them in the 1990s, trying to eliminate the hidden rebels in the Ya.
But after the invasion led by the United States, the authorities opened the valves and wetlands flourished again, even if they are now threatened by climate change.
Hadi said he chose the location in part to point out that “the marshes stayed and Saddam left.”
– EATER INFAME –
To recreate the Iraq of his youth, HADI and his crew paid a lot of attention to the details, accumulating vintage clothes and carrying a barber on the set to cut the hair and mestacas of all to the extras.
They explored the best places, shooting a scene in a small renowned restaurant to have frequented the leg frequented by Saddam himself.
They chose no factors to play common Iraqis under the president’s always presenters in posters, frames and murals.
Hadi said that listening to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to say recently that he planned to lift the sanctions against Syria after the Islamists surpassed President Bashar al-Assad last year was “incredible.”
“I don’t think the sanctions helped in any way to get rid of Bashar, but they definitely trained him to kill more people and torture more people,” he said.
