Iranian Drama ‘My Favourite Cake’

In the quiet, gently subversive Iranian drama My Favourite Cake, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha serve up a delicious slice of life flavored by the bittersweet taste of late middle-age romance.

70-year-old Mahin (Lily Farhadpour, excellent) lives a lonely life in Tehran. Her husband is long dead. Her daughter and granddaughters have emigrated abroad and contact is limited to brief FaceTime chats. Even the once-weekly get-togethers with friends have become an annual affair and the gossip has given way to discussion of bowel polyps and other medical ills.

One day, Mahin decides to stop merely surviving and start living. Spotting the septuagenarian taxi driver Faramaz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), she goes for broke, seducing him and bringing him back to her house for a night of music, dance, and wine. Lots and lots of wine.

The Iranian regime took issue with the wine and with the many hijab-free scenes of Mahin enjoying life. The government threatened legal action. They confiscated Moghadam and Sanaeeha’s passports, banning them from traveling to Berlin for the film’s world premiere. A cardboard portrait of the two directors took their place at the press conference. My Favourite Cake went on to win the Fipresci prize from the international film critics’ association for the best title in the competition.

This crowd-pleaser, which answers authoritarian violence with a celebration of life, has sold to more than two dozen territories worldwide and become a sleeper hit in the U.K., where it earned more than $250,000 for Curzon, for Alamode in Germany and Austria, where they have done more than 100,000 admissions, and in Sweden with more than 40,000 admissions for distributor Triart. But the film has yet to land a U.S. distribution deal. That needs to change.

International sales for My Favourite Cake are being handled by Totem Films.