Month: February 2026

Girl risks her life to bake a cake for Saddam

Baneen Ahmad Nayyef plays Lamia, an Iraqi girl who faces a daunting task in The President’s Cake.

By Richard Ades

Five films have received Oscar noms in the international category, including the French-sponsored Iranian drama It Was Just an Accident and the apparent front-runner, Brazil’s The Secret Agent.

Not on the final list is Iraq’s nominee for the honor—though it’s hard to say why, because the film is a gem.

The President’s Cake, written and directed by Hasan Hadi, is the alternately sad, funny and nail-biting story of Lamia, a 9-year-old girl who receives an unwanted honor: Thanks to a classroom lottery, she’s one of many citizens from across the country who are chosen to bake birthday cakes in honor of dictatorial leader Saddam Hussein.

What makes this task so difficult is that the tale is set in 1990, when Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait has made it the target of military attacks and economic sanctions. As a result, day-to-day survival is hard enough, and finding necessary ingredients such as flour and sugar is nearly impossible.

Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) seldom goes anywhere without her pet rooster, Hindi.

Portrayed with a combination of pluck and vulnerability by Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Lamia is already living on the edge—literally, as her home is located in the swampy Mesopotamian Marshes. Apparently parentless, the child shares a tiny home with her diabetic grandmother, Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), and a rooster named Hindi. Beyond the pet bird, her only friend seems to be Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a neighbor with a reputation for getting into trouble.

When Lamia tells Bibi about her cake-making assignment, the grandmother insists that she skip classes the next day so they can take a trip to the city. Lamia assumes the purpose is to find the proper ingredients, but it turns out Bibi has something else in mind. Knowing her health is failing, the elderly woman plans to leave Lamia with a friend who’s better able to take care of her.

Unfortunately, Lamia mistakes her grandmother’s concern for anger, and she grabs her pet rooster and escapes into the streets of Baghdad. Knowing her friend Saeed had also planned to be in the city that day, she meets up with him and enlists his help as she proceeds to search for the elusive cake ingredients.

The result is a perilous journey that could be described as Dickensian (as in Charles) or Chaplinesque (as in Charlie). Nearly everyone they meet tries to ignore, cheat or even harm them, forcing them to rely on each other and on their own ingenuity. A fine cast, led by the talented youngsters playing Lamia and Saeed, makes it a gripping experience.

Like the aforementioned It Was Just an Accident, Hadi’s debut film portrays a country distorted by authoritarian politics. Hussein’s insistence on total devotion can be seen in the chants of allegiance Lamia and her classmates are forced to repeat every day, and in the countless images of him that can be seen displayed on Baghdad streets.

Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, right) searches for cake ingredients with her friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohammad Qasem).

The film also shows how ordinary Iraqis are hurt by the world’s responses to Hussein’s aggression, including military attacks and sanctions that keep necessary food and medicine out of their hands. It’s a reminder that even well-intentioned actions can have unintended consequences, though it somewhat dilutes Hadi’s political message.

Maybe this helps to explain why the film didn’t score an Oscar nom even though it has so much to offer. Besides an absorbing story, its portrayal of a country under the control of a leader who demands constant obedience and adoration is a chilling vision of where the awards’ host country could well be headed.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

The President’s Cake opened Feb. 6 in New York and Los Angeles and will open wide on Feb. 27.

Blacks, Jews unite in fight to liberate amusement park

By Richard Ades

PBS has just launched Black and Jewish America, a four-week miniseries that examines the political and historical ties between African Americans and Jewish Americans.

For those who want to examine the topic further, a new documentary directed by Ilana Trachtman is a good place to start. Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round tells the fascinating story of a 1960 protest that unexpectedly created cross-cultural ties.

The protest centered on Glen Echo Amusement Park, which once served as a recreation destination for families in the Washington, D.C. area. Offering rides, snacks and a giant pool, it had everything parents needed to keep their kids entertained on hot summer days.

The only problem: You had to be White to enter. Children from local Black neighborhoods could only watch the fun from outside the gates.

The situation eventually prompted students from nearby Howard University to do something about it. However, it took them awhile to get to that point, according to Dion Diamond, one of two Howard alumni interviewed for Trachtman’s film.

During the 1950s, Diamond recalls, most students of the historically Black university were comfortably middle-class and refused to acknowledge that segregation affected them. That didn’t begin to change, he says, until Southern activists launched a sit-in campaign aimed at integrating Woolworth’s lunch counters.

Picketers urge families not to patronize the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park in a scene from Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round.

Inspired by the action, Howard students formed their own civil rights organization, the Nonviolent Action Group, or NAG. Then, after the sit-in achieved success by forcing most Woolworth’s stores to integrate, the group began looking for a new issue to tackle.

They soon found one in their own backyard: Glen Echo.

Thus it was that NAG announced its decision to begin picketing the amusement park on June 30, 1960—only to learn that the issue had already been adopted by residents of Bannockburn, a progressive and largely Jewish neighborhood in nearby Bethesda, Maryland.

Through interviews with Diamond, fellow Howard alum Hank Thomas and then-Bannockburn residents Helene Wilson Ageloff and Esther Delaplain, the documentary explains what happened next.

The Howard students at first had mixed feelings about their new allies, and they were uneasy about the fact that their picket lines were predominantly White. But as the summer wore on, a spirit of camaraderie developed among the students, the Bannockburn volunteers and local Black residents who joined the struggle.

This was fortunate because they faced a difficult battle, which the documentary depicts with the help of vintage footage. Not only did the park’s owners refuse to capitulate, but the picketers were bombarded with racist and antisemitic insults—and even threats—from counter-protesters, including some who wore swastikas.

Trachtman’s documentary reports the protest’s eventual outcome, but it doesn’t stop there. It also reveals the action’s long-term effects on its participants, several of whom went on to engage in other civil rights efforts such as the Freedom Rides.

Toward the end of the film, Howard alumnus Thomas is shown telling a group of students one important fact he learned from the protests: that American Jews have been some of African Americans’ most important allies.

That’s a good jumping-off place for tackling PBS’s Black and Jewish America, which examines the long and sometimes difficult relationship between two groups bonded by their familiarity with historic discrimination.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round can be seen in select theaters and will make its Columbus, Ohio, debut at 2 p.m. Feb. 15 at the Gateway Film Center. For a list of other screenings, visit aintnoback.com/screenings/.

 Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., airs at 9 p.m. Tuesdays on WOSU-TV in Columbus. Check local listings for times in other areas.