The Iraqi film “The President’s Cake” is a great new entry in the vital cinematic tradition exemplified by Italian neorealism. At and after the end of the Second World War, Italian filmmakers responded with a new freedom to the traumas of Fascism and German Occupation as well as to the crises of American intervention amid Italy’s efforts to rebuild physically, politically, and morally. “The President’s Cake,” written and directed by Hasan Hadi, is one of the few recent films I’ve seen that fulfills a similar mission in a country similarly devastated by autocracy and war. Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Like many of the essential neorealist films (such as “Paisan” and “Shoeshine”), “The President’s Cake” is intently focussed on catastrophic poverty issuing from war. It’s centered on the plights of children unmoored from overwhelmed or absent families, and it’s keenly attentive to the emotional and practical havoc wrought by a ruthless dictator. The movie is set in the span of a few days, in April, 1990, a period that Hadi appears to treat as a composite, folding in the harrowing results of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, in August of that year, which prompted U.N.-imposed sanctions and U.S.-led bombing raids. Even in the best of times, the film’s main characters weren’t prosperous. The protagonist is a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who lives with her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), in a mudhif, a house of twisted reeds, in Iraq’s southern marshlands. Lamia is an exceptional student, top of the class, but to get to school she, like many others in the region, must punt across a marsh. Some kids are ferried by a parent or guardian; Lamia transports herself.

Her grandma (Bibi, in Iraqi Arabic) is a farm worker who, on the morning of April 26th, two days before President Saddam Hussein’s birthday, is abruptly fired—involuntarily retired—by the landlord whose property she tills. She and Lamia thus turn instantly from poor to destitute. The timing couldn’t be worse, because, later that very day, Lamia is randomly chosen in school for a great honor that’s also a grave responsibility: to bake a birthday cake for Hussein, as is done in all schools throughout the country. Bibi can’t afford even the basic ingredients—eggs, flour, sugar, baking powder—but failure to bring the cake would be a severely punishable political offense. So, the next day, Bibi packs salable possessions—a radio, a pocket watch, some plates, some tchotchkes—and, with Lamia (and the girl’s pet rooster) in tow, hitches a ride with a postman named Jasim (Rahim AlHaj) to a nearby city, where they make the rounds of street merchants and try to come up with the money.

In the city, the story splits in half: Lamia gets separated from Bibi (for reasons I wouldn’t dare disclose) and searches for the one person she knows there, a classmate’s father, who supposedly works at an amusement park. At the venue, she espies the classmate, a boy named Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), picking someone’s pocket. When the police give chase, Lamia runs off with him. The rest of the film is a classic double adventure—Lamia and Saeed, now a team, take perilous risks to procure the needed ingredients for the cake, while Bibi desperately looks for Lamia.

Throughout, Hadi calls attention to the brutality that’s endemic in Iraqi daily life under a dictatorship. The ubiquitous portraits of Hussein—in classrooms and offices, in restaurants and stores, as freestanding steles and on public murals—match the reign of terror that he conducts. When Saeed visits Lamia at home, he wonders whether the President actually eats all the cakes, and Lamia hushes him: “Walls have ears.” The children’s classroom is run by a teacher who declares himself a soldier; each school day begins with the students’ mandatory fervent martial pledge to sacrifice body and soul for Hussein, and the teacher reminds the class that another classmate, who failed to honor the President’s birthday, was “dragged like a dog” along with his family.

But the most prominent form of daily brutality is economic deprivation, owing in large measure to the U.N. sanctions. The movie opens with marshland residents, including Lamia and Bibi, lining up far back and pressing urgently forward, jerricans in hand, to receive fresh water at a tanker truck from officials offering it as a gift from Hussein. Later, in the city, people similarly crowd into a store, waving bills frantically as if at an auction, as they clamor for flour. Taking advantage of such desperation, the more fortunate become predators: male merchants use food as lures for sex—even targeting Lamia. Navigating the city alone, she is forced into risky survivalism, perilously hitching a ride on the rear bumper of a bus for which she can’t afford the fare. Though revolted by theft, she ends up stealing. The country runs on bribes, whether at an imposing military checkpoint, at a police station, or at a hospital (even though, in the scene in question, the needed medicine is unavailable because of sanctions).

It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper. When things go sour, both kids spew insults and indignation with a matter-of-fact insolence. At moments of exceptional gravity, they play a staring contest that fills the screen with an ingenuous romanticism. The bonds of the children, Bibi, the postman, and a very few others in their circle endow “The President’s Cake” with a grandly humanistic warmth that’s all the stronger for the mighty pressure under which it’s forged.

What carries the drama toward sublimity, though, is Hadi’s way with the physical world and his characters’ place in it. His camera eye (thanks to cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru) is avidly alert to texture and makes visual patterns seem urgently tactile. In this regard, Hadi’s film reminds me of masterworks of the American director Joseph Losey (such as “Eva”and “These Are the Damned”), in which material surroundings rivalled behavior in expressing characters’ inner lives. “The President’s Cake” is adorned, embossed, scarred, and exalted with what gives daily life its literal feelings. The curves and twists of the reeds with which Lamia’s and Saeed’s homes are made; the angularities of modernist concrete walkways; the raw edges of bricks in the walls of a long alley; the rich jumble of foods that fill teeming markets; an arcades’ graceful arches; the exacting tile work on a mosque—all carry the mark of labor, forethought, and love. Hadi’s exceptional attention gives cinematic identity to collective artisanal energy, to the life force of care and devotion that stands outside the agonies of politics, to the spirit that endures a regime and outlives it. ♦