In the silent and delicately subversive Iranian drama My favorite cakeMaryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha offer a delightful slice of life flavored with the bittersweet flavor of late medieval romance.
Mahin (Lily Farhadpour, excellent) is 70 years old and lives a solitary life in Tehran. Her husband has long since died. His daughter and granddaughters have emigrated abroad and contact is limited to brief FaceTime chats. Even weekly meetings with friends have become an annual event and gossip has given way to discussions about intestinal polyps and other medical diseases.
One day, Mahin decides to simply stop surviving and start living. Spotting the seventy-year-old taxi driver Faramaz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), she decides everything, seducing him and taking him back to her home for a night of music, dance and wine. Lots and lots of wine.
The Iranian regime has taken issue with the wine and the numerous hijab-free scenes in which Mahin enjoys 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. The press conference featured a cardboard portrait of the two directors. My favorite cake it then won the Fipresci award from the international film critics association for the best title in competition.
This crowd-pleasing film, which responds to authoritarian violence with a celebration of life, was sold to more than two dozen territories worldwide and became a major hit in the United Kingdom, where it earned more than $250,000 per Curzon, for Alamode in Germany and Austria, where they recorded more than 100,000 entries and in Sweden more than 40,000 entries for the distributor Triart. But the film has yet to land a distribution deal in the United States. This has to change.
International sales for My favorite cake are managed by Totem Films.