Help is mounting throughout the worldwide movie neighborhood for Iranian directing duo Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha forward of their trial over “propaganda in opposition to the regime” allegations associated to their movie “My Favorite Cake.” The 2 are set to face Iran‘s Revolutionary Court docket on Saturday.
Signatories embrace Mohammad Rasoulof — the director of the Oscar-nominated characteristic “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” who in Could fled from Iran to keep away from prosecution associated to that movie — alongside Pedro Almodóvar, Juliette Binoche, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Agnieszka Holland, Hiam Abbas, Isabel Coixet and the administrators of the Venice, Berlin, Rotterdam and Sydney movie festivals. In complete, the petition launched by the Worldwide Coalition for Filmmakers at Threat (ICFR) has gathered over 3,000 signatures to this point.
After months of interrogations and steady journey bans over the previous two years – bans which prevented them from attending final yr’s Berlin Movie Pageant the place “My Favorite Cake” bowed in competitors – Moghaddam and Sanaeeha at the moment are because of seem in courtroom. They’re charged with making a movie labelled as “obscene” and “offending public morality.” They’re additionally accused of “propaganda in opposition to the regime” and different expenses claiming the movie was “unlawfully” screened with out the Iranian authorities’ permits for distribution.
“Within the gentle of those persecutions, we stand uniformly by Maryam and Behtash and their freedom and proper to create and to specific themselves, identical to any filmmaker and artist ought to be capable to,” the ICFR petition reads.
Since its 2024 Berlin bow, the tender rom-com a few 70-year-old girl named Mahin who decides to interrupt her solitary routine and revitalize her love life — she seems unveiled within the movie — has offered broadly all over the world and given audiences a glimpse of a not often seen side of Iranian society.
As Selection critic Jessica Kiang put it in her “My Favorite Cake” assessment, “Mahin embarks on a particularly genteel type of cruising, permitting the character’s sense of mischief and self-aware daring to peek by means of her pure, and socially mandated, reserve.”
