The President's Cake (12A)

There’s a terrific charm to this Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour

The tale begins just two days before the birthday of President Hussein. Celebrating that event is mandatory. Our heroine here is a nine-year-old Lamia. She is the one chosen to make a special cake for the occasion. Lamia sets off into town with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) on a desperate shopping expedition, carrying her pet cockerel, Hindi.

Hooking up with a scallywag boy from school (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), she addresses the impossible task of getting the humble items for the cake. With no money, faced with tradesmen hanging by a money thread themselves, she’s in a desperate, developing world version of The Apprentice.

The film seeks morality in a teetering society, and if it offers a moral imperative it’s that no one should be the first in line to judge, or be judged. Lamia has an uncertain life that she’s determined to live – to subvert it but never sacrifice her soul