My Favourite Cake

Tender and funny yet politically daring, this double-Berlinale-winning late-life romance is guaranteed to steal your heart.

At 70, retired nurse Mahin lives alone in Tehran; her husband is long dead, and her daughter and grandchildren reside abroad. She’s of a mind to do as she pleases: sleeping in ’til noon, gossiping bawdily with friends and defending a girl whom the morality police have accused of an improperly worn hijab. But she’s lonely, too – so she decides it’s time to find herself a new man. That’s how Mahin ends up inviting Faramarz, an unmarried taxi driver her own age, to her home for an intimate night of orange-blossom sponge cake, illicit wine and company.

Winning the Berlinale’s FIPRESCI Prize and Ecumenical Jury Prize, My Favourite Cake is warm, charming and incisive in its depiction of older women’s inner lives – but it also breaks several entrenched Iranian cinematic taboos. Its subversiveness is such that writer/directors Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha (Ballad of a White Cow) were unable to accept their awards in person, as the Iranian government had confiscated their passports. The bubble of intimacy the film defiantly creates for Mahin and Faramarz may be even more precious because it’s so precarious.

Persian language with English subtitles.