İlişki Bağımlılığı: Kendini Kaybetmeden Sevmek

Iraqi filmmaker Hassan Hadd's first feature film, the President's Cake, draws on his own memories of growing up in 1990s southern Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Iraqis are struggling to make ends meet under heavy-american stations and a dictatorship that pulls the country's wealth for itself. And Saddam's birthday is coming up, a national holiday. At school there's a draw for children to prepare gifts their families can't afford for the occasion. And the most expensive item is a cake, which nine-year-old Lemia is chosen to bake. I really think it's about the power of love, friendship and sacrifice under wartime sanctions and dictatorship. It's about these two children and her grandmother embarking on this adventure under their own under circumstances. So Lemia goes on a journey to find the ingredients with her friends IEED and her pet rooster. Hadd told me he based the story on the draw in his own school when he was a kid. One of my friends actually got paid for the cake and it was the most difficult item because it was such a scarcity in flour, sugar. And that's because of US sanctions at the time. Exactly. And he just felt to make the cake and he was expelled from the school and later he had to join Saddam's children army. Oh my gosh. And now the main character, Lemia, she tries to not get picked. Yeah. What does she think the consequences will be? Everything is on the table. Your life, your livelihood, your parents, your own personal safety. Under such brutal regimes, I think it's so intentional to keep all these things ambiguous in order to create such an impactful fear element inside you. Very early on in the film. Lemia, whose name is Benin Ahmednaev in real life? Yes. And she's a brilliant. I mean, I guess she's not an actress, right? You didn't really hire any trained actors. Yeah, it was all non-professional street cast actors. They're amazing. Yes. We were very lucky with them. So very early on in the film, before she's picked for the cake, she's talking to her friend Syed. And she tells him the walls have ears. Where did that line come from? It's honestly from really our daily life. When Saddam took power, one of the first things he did, he literally posted phone numbers on the TV, asking people to call in if they know any spy. So somehow he turned all the citizens of Iraq into informants. Anyone who has any kind of problems with anyone or a wife has a problem with her husband. Like a man has a problem with his cousin. Something like that. Then suddenly they turn into informants. They call the police or the authorities and report them as spies. Like you're growing up in such an abusive family. You're so think, you know what I mean? You grow up with fear. You grow up with constant feeling of danger. And that somehow changes the nature of the society, the ethical lines, the moral fabric, somehow all of these changes. And it turns you into someone else. And there's like a selfishness and a meanness to the adults around as they try to survive Saddam's regime. Yeah, they turn a society to hypocrites, liars. So in a way, especially at that time childhood innocence didn't exist. It actually was front-up on when a child wouldn't drop from the school because they were required to go and help their parents to bring food to the table. What I found so brilliant was the way that you showed these regular people trying to go to school and live life and eat every day, and stuck between an oppressive dictator who's turning everybody in informants on each other and forcing you to celebrate his birthday. And US foreign policy where sanctions are impacting not Saddam Hussein who's having lavish parties, but the Mias family and Saeed's family. Walk me through the way that you wove that in around their love story and their quest. There's this powerful love that Saeed has towards Lemia. And in the story we have Saeed who sort of asks Lemia to refute to stealing. And at the beginning we see her being ethical and not just, she's not going to do that. But at the end we see also how she changes her mind only because there is war and sanctions. That she has to compromise her moral compass. That she has to compromise the whole, yeah, there's a scene when Lemia comes out of the mosque and looks at the F-16, which is sort of represents the international community, sort of represents the US sanctions. And she looks at the F-16 and the F-16 looks back. For me that's when Lemia is looking at the people, at us, as the audience, and sort of wondering why this silence. When I was watching it, it was happening in 1990, but it felt so relevant for many things today, right? Syria just fell and they had this bathist regime. But also here in the US, we hear critics say that President Trump is building monuments to himself with plans around what he wants to do in DC or him re-neaming a building. And I just wondered, with the movie coming out now, do you see those parallels with the US? Oh, I see lots of threat flags, but over the world not only in the US, but there is some sort of nostalgia for authoritarian regime or authoritarian leaders. And unfortunately, that's really the danger. When your birthday becomes a national thing, when your name becomes something that everywhere you see, this is all remind me of growing up in Iraq. Like the strong man kind of. The authoritarian regimes that really don't care about the law, that the law cannot draw the line for them. It's their own ethics, it's their own morals that draws the line. And you know, then it's a chaos, so down was like that. There was no one, no parliament, no Congress, no. Nothing could stop Saddam from doing a war because his moral line, his ethical line dictates that. And it's becoming a bit like that in the rest of the region. That's Hassan Haddie, his new film is out now. It's called The President's Cake, and it won the audience award in the best first feature film prize at Khan last year. Thank you so much for your time and for this film. Congratulations. Thank you very much, Eda. Thank you.