The President's Cake
Directors’
Fortnight
People's Choice Award
Best First
Feature
Official Selection
Iraqi Entry
Official Selection
The President's Cake
A Film by Hasan Hadi
2025 - Iraq/USA/Qatar - Drama - 105 min.
with Baneen Ahmed Nayyef , Sajad Mohamad Qasem & Waheed Thabet Khreibat
Oscars 2026: Official Iraqi Submission
Language: Arabic
While people across 1990s Iraq struggle to survive the war and food shortages, Saddam Hussein requires each school in the country to prepare a cake to celebrate his birthday. Despite her efforts to avoid getting picked, 9-year-old Lamia is chosen among her classmates. The young girl must now use her wits and imagination to gather ingredients for the mandatory cake or face the consequences.
Directors’
Fortnight
People's Choice Award
Best First
Feature
Official Selection
Iraqi Entry
Official Selection
More Films
I Deserve A Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across The Skies
A film by Mani Haghighi
2026 - Iran - Documentary - 76 min.
Set between Tabriz and Tehran in the weeks between the Twelve-Day War and the subsequent conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States, this film follows two Iranian artists whose lives have become inseparable from a vast private archive assembled over decades: photographs, documents, discarded objects, and traces of anonymous lives. Working somewhere between collecting, hoarding, preservation, and obsession, they have created an improvised museum of neglected lives, one in which sex workers, young soldiers, child labourers, gay lovers, and ordinary families emerge through abandoned albums, damaged belongings, and fragments of memory left behind by history.
Franz
A film by Agnieszka Holland
2025 - Czech Republic/Germany/Poland - Biopic/Drama - 127 min.
Award-winning director Agnieszka Holland is embarking on her most ambitious project to date, a biopic of the iconic 20th-century Czech writer Franz Kafka. Conceived as a kaleidoscopic mosaic, the film will follow the imprint Kafka left on the world from his birth in 19th-century Prague to his death in post-WW1 Vienna. FRANZ will give the audience a brand new perspective on the life of the man behind the literary giant.
Tuesday, After Christmas
A film by Radu Muntean
2010 - Romania - Drama/Romance - 2.35 DCP - 99 min.
Paul is married to Adriana for 10 years. They have a daughter, a car, an apartment and they still seem to be in love. Paul also has an affair with Raluca, a 27-years-old dentist he met 6 months ago. Paul loves both women, but when the two of them meet by chance, he’s forced to make a decision.