Iranian directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam have received a 14-month jail sentence as well $14,000 worth of fines related to their feature My Favourite Cake which world premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2024.
The filmmaking duo and their producer and Gholamreza Mousavi have been in the crosshairs of Iran’s authoritarian Islamic Republic regime since early 2023 over the heartwarming drama about an elderly widow who reconnects with life’s small pleasures in the face of solitude.
Sanaeeha and Moghadam, who is also a Swedish national, were grounded by a travel ban prior to the film’s world premiere in Berlin and the couple have since been subjected to an Islamic Revolutionary Court investigation. In the lead-up to the court hearing in February, they also started receiving death threats.
Elements of My Favourite Cake which upset the Iranian authorities include showing the female protagonist, played by Lily Farhadpour, without a headscarf as well as the storyline around her romance with an equally lonely widower and scenes in which she dances and drinks wine with him.
Court papers released by Branch 26 of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran this week state that Sanaeeham, Moghadam and Mousavi were convicted “of propaganda against the Islamic Republic through dissemination of false information intended to disturb public opinion” as well as producing “obscene content”.
They were sentenced to 14 months of discretionary imprisonment, suspended for five years, and ordered to pay a fine of 400M Iranian Rials ($9.4K) to the state treasury. Additionally, the trio were also fined 200 million Iranian Rials ($4.7K) and had their equipment confiscated for screening and distributing the film without an official exhibition license.
My Favourite Cake was made in the wake of Iran’s 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests, sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody after she was arrested for not covering her hair in accordance with the Islamic Republic’s sexist rules around how women should dress.
Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution women were free to wear what they wanted.
My Favourite Cake is among a number of Iranian features made in the wake of the protests showing women without their head covered.
Mohamed Rasoulof’s Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Secret Fig, shot undercover in Iran prior to going into exile in Germany in 2024, went further, challenging the patriarchal system on which the country is run. Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi, who is also living outside of the country, has said he will not shoot in Iran until the obligation to wear a hijab is lifted.
The political persecution of Sanaeeham and Moghadam, who are stuck in Iran, has sparked concern in the international film industry.
More than 3,000 cinema professionals – including Juliette Binoche, Pedro Almodóvar, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Hiam Abbass, Alberto Barbera, Tricia Tuttle and Rebecca Zlotowski – signed a petition calling for the directors to be released and the charges to be dropped ahead of the trial in February.
The International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), a joint venture between the European Film Academy, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), which instigated the petition has called on the international film community to keep highlight the plight of Sanaeeham, Moghadam and Mousavi.
