"But he still managed to fall in love with films after a family member roped him into helping her distribute VHS tapes of banned foreign movies. I was a kid, says the 37-year-old, so no one would suspect me of smuggling. I'd put the tapes up my shirt or in my bag. Hadi started secretly watching the films, too, everything from Bruce Lee to Tarkovsky."
"How, I ask, would the authorities have punished you if you'd been caught in possession of banned films? Hadi pauses. It depends. There were no specific rules. But if it was a political film, or something really forbidden by the regime, it could go to execution. They would execute a child? Hadi nods. We're talking about a period when childhood lost its innocence."
During the 1990s in Iraq, cinemas were absent and banned foreign films circulated on VHS tapes, secretly distributed and watched by children like Hasan Hadi. Possession of politically forbidden material carried arbitrary and severe punishments, including the risk of execution, and childhood innocence was compromised by constant surveillance and fear. Hadi's feature The President's Cake portrays early-1990s Iraq through the eyes of nine-year-old Lamia, capturing life under Saddam's personality cult, the hardship of sanctions, compulsory national rituals, and the mixture of warmth, humour and heartbreak experienced by children living under authoritarian rule.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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