When director Hasan Hadi was a young boy in southern Iraq, nothing at his school mattered more than former president Saddam Hussein’s birthday.
Hadi remembers it vividly – the day he and his classmates, most under 10, put their names into a hat to decide their “assignments” for the celebrations. Hadi drew flower-bearer. Surrounded by the fecund marshlands, that was one of the easier tasks. He breathed a sigh of relief.
His friend, however, drew the most difficult one – he had to bake the cake. In another time and place, it would have been simple. But with sugar and flour both illegal to have or sell in Iraq at the time, it was all but impossible. The boy tried as hard as he could to source the ingredients, but to no avail. When he went to class and announced there would be no cake, the school promptly expelled him.
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