The Power of Children in Film
Review by In the Frame participant Tim Yap
In the Frame is a program that fosters inquiry, reflection, and an appetite for cinema. As part of our In the Frame program, up to four emerging film critics had the opportunity to watch, reflect on and review films in the Perth Festival Lotterywest Films 2025 – 26 season.
How The President's Cake and The Voice of Hind Rajab use children as a tool to remind humanity of its failings. As someone who spends much of his spare time watching film, it can often be difficult to remain as impacted by the narrative tropes or filmmaking devices commonly used to evoke strong emotion or calls to action. This was not the case when watching both The President’s Cake and The Voice of Hind Rijab during Perth Festival's Lotterywest Films program, films which tackle politically and socially poignant topics through a lens audiences find almost impossible to ignore - the lens of children.
The President’s Cake follows Lamia, a 9-year-old orphan, living with her Grandma Bibi in the poverty-stricken Mesopotamian Marshes, tasked with providing her class with a cake for Saddam Hussein's birthday. From the moment I met Lamia I wanted her to succeed, to find a way to thrive in a world constructed for her to fail. But as she embarks alongside her friend Saeed on a harrowing journey across Iraq in search for ingredients for said cake, this want soon turned to worry.
For me, there is little more impactful than experiencing a broken world through the eyes of children, constantly failed by the adults meant to protect them, and this is something Hasan Hadi captures so powerfully through various interactions Lamia faces.
The first of these is small, almost inconsequential in Lamia’s life, but indicative of the larger world she is soon to step into; as her teacher steals the only piece of food she has been given for the day - an apple. The next is more understandable, but heartbreaking nonetheless, as her Grandma Bibi admits she has taken Lamia to the city to be adopted by a young loving couple who will do what she no longer can - care for her. Then, as Lamia ventures on her own, these meetings become more unjust, more sinister.
The shopkeeper; who only agrees to part with 500 grams of sugar in exchange for sexual favours from a pregnant customer, only to retreat on his promise once she goes into labour. The bakery workers; who after Lamia pawns her Dad’s watch for cash and admires the beautiful cakes on display, claim she cannot afford such luxuries, and that her money is counterfeit, stealing it for themselves. And finally and by far and away the most confronting, the paedophile; who uses baking powder as a means to lure Lamia into a dark cinema where he wishes to take advantage of her.
It's difficult to watch, and I found myself constantly wanting to reach out to Lamia, help her when others wouldn’t, a feeling I’m sure that was instinctual to all watching the film. I didn’t feel there were any deeper undertones, no greater messages of hope, just images of a child, searching for help from the adults meant to do just that, only to be taken advantage of at every turn, something that feels innately wrong yet is being depicted on screen for all to see. And as the final scene closes to the sight of bombs surrounding Lamia and her classmates, and the cake we’ve watched Lamia toil so tirelessly to produce proves meaningless, we are confronted with our own failures to protect, to save another child from a death otherwise normalised by the world around us.
This normalisation of death within the context of war has crept into the subconscious of so many of us throughout the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with the constant flooding of graphic and upsetting information making it easy even for the self-professed “educated and empathetic” people of the world to put up barriers. Not with an intent to ignore, but to protect oneself from emotions that may leave us feeling uncomfortable.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is a film that confronts this uncomfortability head-on, finding common ground with its audience as a means in which to break through this normalisation. And much like in The President’s Cake, this common ground comes in the form of children.
In Voice, we aren’t watching tragedy on a grand-scale from our phone screen or twitter feeds, but through the very real sound of a five-year-old girl on the end of a desperate phone call; a five-year-old girl with six deceased family members, lying beside her in her gunned down black Kia; a five-year old girl asking, pleading with the adults meant to protect her, to do just that. There is no imagery of explosions or bloody limbs, just the sounds of not so distant gunfire, and the screams of an innocent family. And suddenly our parental instincts are triggered, and it becomes more difficult to turn away, more difficult to normalise this reality we already exist in.
For me, what truly elevates the emotional impact of Voice, and where it differs from Cake, is the choice to centre the film not on Hind’s experience, but the experience of the adults tasked with her rescue. Characters who, by their own choice of work, bear witness to the deaths of so many innocent people, yet are still so viscerally impacted by one little-girl, whose fate may already have been decided.
Something I noticed during my initial watch of the film was how each of the characters portray different stages of grief as Hind’s situation unfolds. The most obvious of these being Omar, the first respondent to the emergency phone call from Hind’s cousin, with his actions and reactions almost anchoring the events of the film.
At first is his denial, as the first phone call cuts out following the sound of echoed screams and wayward gunshots. Omar refuses to believe the fate of the unknown caller, summoned to his supervisor’s office and offered the help of the team’s support/mental health worker to deal with the reality of her death, his first as an emergency call operator. Then almost working in tangent, his anger and denial, on constant display after he finds out Hind is alive. Omar continuously struggles with the administrative hurdles preventing the team from coordinating a safe rescue. He desperately pleads to his superiors to take impossible action to save her, blatantly disregarding their warnings as to the dangers of doing so. At one point during the film, he even secretly phones the Ambulance officers on the ground, telling them of a not-yet approved “safe” passage to Hind’s car. An irrational action that within the context of this grief, becomes entirely relatable to us as viewers.
Finally, depression, seen not only through Omar but each of our characters. Rana’s moments of maternalistic heartbreak, as she moves the microphone of her headpiece away from her mouth so Hind can’t hear her crying; Madhi’s eventual blow-up and breakdown as he locks himself in the bathroom, falls to the floor and plays a game on his phone to distract him from this harrowing dilemma he's found himself in; or the close-up of Omar’s face, as he realises he’s lost Hind’s voice for the final time.
What isn’t found through our characters however, is this final stage of grief; acceptance. And through this, whether intentional or not, director Kaouther Ben Hania asks a very powerful question of her audience; if the almost inevitable death of this five-year-old girl is yet to be accepted, yet to be normalised by the same people risking their own lives to save her, why should it be accepted and normalised by the rest of us?
The answer; it shouldn't. And when the film ended I was left with a feeling of frustration and unease directed both at the world, as well as myself. The world for obvious reasons but myself, because the film had highlighted in a very personal way, my own failings.
When I’m not watching movies, I work as a Doctor in a Paediatric Emergency Department. One of the most common questions I get asked amongst the small talk of meeting new people is whether such a job is difficult. With the unglamorous truth being that no, it’s often not. Am I somewhat conditioned to answer this way? Potentially. But unlike adult Emergency Departments, where code blues and cardiac arrests are commonplace, children are for the most part generally well, particularly in a first-world country like Australia where access to healthcare is free and/or affordable. When tragedy does strike though, which it does, it is devastating, and something I know I will never fully come to terms with.
Whenever we do have a death in the department, various words and sentiments are often thrown around, all with the shared purpose of encouraging staff not to normalise such an experience. The problem I find with this, is that this is difficult when you are surrounded by people who have shared in the exact same experience as you have. It is in these moments that I find it important to talk to those outside of healthcare. To be reminded by someone close to me that this is not a normal part of working life, that no one should go to work and bear witness to the loss of a child.
Although I won’t ever shy away from this sentiment, it did prompt much self-reflection after watching the film. As while Voice uses very real characters to remind the watching world that the death of these children is in fact not normal, we, when tragedy strikes our own lives, seem to look to the watching world for those very same reminders; a humbling dichotomy of our current collective state of mind.
And so, at a time when the world around us is uncertain, and events threaten the very values we once deemed secure, The President’s Cake and The Voice of Hind Rijab use the experiences of children in this seemingly broken world that we have created as a mirror, reflecting back upon us humanity's own failings in the harshest way possible, our failings of those we are born to protect.