If you want an art form to thrive (in a country where not everything can be expressed), forbid it or make it hard to produce or create. For the last four or five decades, this has been true of Iran’s film production, one of the most original anywhere. Directors, storylines, and actors are all strikingly one of a kind, even if often copied when made public. When one knows how difficult and complicated it can be, in the land of censorship, to bring together a movie, the hoops creators and actors have to jump through for the slew of indispensable authorizations, we can only be grateful for the high-quality product regularly brought before the public and, just as regularly, recipient of the most prestigious awards in the cinema world.

Such is the case when viewing the positively lovely (and masterly) “My Favorite Cake” by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, with Lily Farhadpour and Esmaeel Mehrabi.

Two close-to-elderly characters meet–lonely characters (he is a cab driver, and she is also seventyish, a woman whose only good moments come with the rare visits of her children who live abroad or with friends with whom to share delicacies.) They both understand (and miss) their vanished youth; they are both willing to look back to better years when they could share a moment of excitement and sexual satisfaction; she is more forward than he; he is ready for an almost forgotten treat.

But then, things turn out very different from the expected, tragedy strikes instead of the anticipated glowing return to their better years, the only thing left is to hide the evidence, forget they ever met and share tragedy instead of a treat of which they barely remembered the taste.