Showing On 3, 5, 6 March
Monday 6pm, Wednesday 4pm and Thursday 6pm
Watch The Trailer
Storyline (warning: spoilers)
This wonderfully sweet film will contribute to the debate about whether repressive regimes are the nursery of artistic greatness. The Iranian government has prevented the film’s two directors, from travelling to Berlin to attend its premiere; their production offices were raided and computers confiscated. But, fortunately, the film-makers had a copy stored in another country, and the film’s gentle humanity is a compelling rebuke to this fatuous, clumsy repression.
Mahin (Lili Farhadpour) is the 70-year-old heroine – who wistfully remembers a time when hijabs were not required – who stands up to the morality police in Tehran and rescues a woman from their clutches. Her story is a meditation on love and loss, loneliness and old age, and on the price at which long-term married happiness is bought. It is a meditation on how women come to terms with the destiny of widowhood. Mahin’s daughter and grandchildren live abroad, and her muted existence alone in her apartment is revealed in a series of tremendously composed tableaux. There are FaceTime phone calls with her daughter which somehow never allow for a proper talk. She has difficulty getting to sleep and doesn’t get up before noon. She waters her garden plants, goes shopping and occasionally hosts lunches for her female friends.
Here the conversation turns to whether it is possible to find romance again. And so Mahin, without quite admitting it to herself, modifies her aimless daytime schedule with a secret end in view: to meet a man. She finds herself meeting Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), a modest, personable single man of her age. He is a cab driver and military veteran, who himself is of Mahin’s independent cast of mind: he got into trouble with joyless authorities for playing a musical instrument in a wedding band. And so Faramarz and Mahin have their moment together at her apartment, where she offers to bake him her favourite cake. It is a moment of emotional connection. There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.