“Sanctions empower dictators,“ he told AFP, as they concentrate scant resources in their hands and only make them “more brutal”.
Hadi’s first feature film, “The President’s Cake”, has received very good reviews since premiering Friday in the Directors’ Fortnight section.
The film follows nine-year-old Lamia after she has the misfortune of being picked by her school teacher to bake the class a cake for the president's birthday, or be denounced for disloyalty.
As they set off into town to hunt down unaffordable ingredients, with Lamia's pet cockerel and their last meagre belongings to sell, the film plunges into the social reality -- and everyday petty corruption -- of 1990s Iraq.
It sent the country “hundreds of years back”.
The filmmaker said he did not taste cake until he was in his early teens, after the US-led invasion in 2003 toppled Saddam and sanctions were lifted.
“As a kid you’re sad that you’re not getting your cake,“ he said. But as you grow up, you realise what your parents must have gone through to put food on the table.
Hadi and his team shot the film entirely in Iraq.
Saddam drained them in the 1990s, trying to flush out rebels hiding in the reeds.
Hadi said he chose the location partly to make the point that “the marshes stayed and Saddam went away”.
To re-create the Iraq of his youth, Hadi and his crew paid close attention to detail, amassing vintage clothes and bringing a barber on set to trim the hair and moustaches of everyone down to the extras.
They chose non-actors to play ordinary Iraqis under the ever-present eyes of the president in posters, pictures frames and murals.
“I don’t think the sanctions helped in any way to get rid of Bashar, but definitely empowered him to kill more people, and torture more people,“ he said.
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