News

Iranian directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam have appealed for support after they received a court summons and anonymous death threats related to their film My Favourite Cake which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024.

A heartwarming tale of love and loss and coming to terms with old age, My Favourite Cake stars Lily Farhadpour as a 70-year-old widow who reconnects with life’s small pleasures in the face of solitude, following her husband’s death.

In a message posted on social media, Sanaeeha said that after several interrogation sessions related to the film at the security prosecutor’s office for Iran’s notorious Evin jail, he and Moghadam had been summoned for a hearing at a revolutionary court on March 1.

The charges against them are: propaganda against the regime; production, distribution, and duplication of a film with obscene content; offending public decency and morality and screening the...

Elderly, overweight and alone, Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) sleeps until noon, her boredom and isolation palpable. Yet this apparently lonely 70-year-old widow is not as sad a figure as the opening scenes of My Favourite Cake suggest. Directed by Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha (who were prevented from leaving Iran when the film premiered in Berlin last year), this is no sorry tale of lonely old age, at least not entirely.

Mahin is a retired nurse on the outskirts of Teheran, widowed for 30 years and with no desire to remarry. Mahin reminisces about the before-times, when she would go to the Hyatt Hotel (ironically now renamed the Freedom Hotel) wearing ‘high heels and plunging necklines’. She also recalls that she and her friends find it harder to meet: weekly get-togethers are now annual, while other activities have had to be renounced.

If that all sounds a little joyless, Mahin eats what she wants,...

Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha won’t be coming to Berlin. The Iranian directors, whose feature Ballad of a White Cow received a rapturous reception here in 2020, were set to attend the 74th Berlinale with their latest competition entry, My Favourite Cake.

“But then the police came, took our passports and told us were banned from traveling,” says Moghaddam, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via Zoom from the couple’s home in Tehran. “We are now facing a court case because of the film.”

The Berlinale has called on Iran to release the directors, saying it was “shocked and dismayed” to hear of the couple’s fate.

My Favourite Cake follows 70-year-old Mahin (Ballad of a White Cow actress Lili Farhadpour) who, after decades of living alone, decides to revive her love life. On a whim, she propositions Faramarz, a solidarity cab driver (Esmaeel Mehrabi), and invites him to her house.