My Favourite Cake (Keyk-e Mahbub-e Man)  (2024), BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, writers and directors Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002wz2m/my-favourite-cake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Favourite_Cake

My Favourite Cake will take around one-and-a-half hours of your life, but will give you so much back. A simple story about two lonely seventy-year-old people meeting and falling in love over one evening.  

What gives it added poignancy is it’s set in Tehran. Before the bombings and mass killings and intervention by the moron’s moron Trump and his almost equally corrupt Israelite sidekick.

Nothing here about oil. The Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf.

Reminders that real people live here. Not just politicians and soldiers. The language is Farsi. But the themes are universal. What it means to be old, forgotten and lonely.

(Lily Farhadpour) Mahin decides to leave her apartment. To take a chance and go out alone. She confronts the morality police trying to arrest a young woman in a park for having the wrong kind of hijab with her hair showing. Mahin’s intervention saves her and the young woman hurries away to meet her boyfriend.

Mahin recalls a time when the authorities did not arrest women for having a boyfriend. She met her future husband, wore her hair loose, and danced in a hotel.

Women could no longer meet men unsupervised. Yet, at a restaurant that offers pension’s discount, she spies another older man, a taxi driver, (Esmail Mehrabi) Faramarz also eating alone.

She takes the initiative and gets him to drive her home. Wonderful.

Be warned. There’s no sex. But there is cake.