This year the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF, 13-22 November), presided over by president Hussein Fahmy and director Essam Zakaria, featured an opening ceremony dedicated to Palestine with a dabke show. Companies targeted by the boycott campaign were not allowed to sponsor the festival. Zakaria also added two new section: “From Ground Zero”, featuring 22 short films by artists from Gaza, organised by the Mashawari Fund for filmmakers in Gaza, and “Spotlight on Palestine”. This is in addition to a third new section, “Made in Egypt”, focusing on films from around the world that were filmed in Egypt. This year the CIFF’s Golden Pyramid Award for Lifetime Achievement went to the renowned Egyptian filmmaker Yousri Nasrallah, who started his career in 1982 as an assistant director to the late Youssef Chahine, making his debut Sareqat Sayfeya (Summer Thefts), in 1988. Nasrallah’s works include Bab Al-Shams (Gate of the Sun, 2004), Mercedes (1993) and Al-Madina (The City, 2000).

The 45th CIFF featured the Iranian film My Favourite Cake, screened to a full house in the Official Selection Out of Competition section at the Cairo Opera House Small Hall where the audience were notably responsive. The film made its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last February, but its makers, Maryam Moghadam and Bahtash Sanaeeha, have since been in trouble with the authorities in Iran, banned from leaving the country. Unlike many Iranian filmmakers, it turns out, Moghadam and Sanaeeha are actually based in Iran.

This simple story, tightly written by the filmmakers, effortlessly transports the viewer to the world of Mahin (Lili Farhadpour), a 70-year-old woman living alone in a big house with a lovely garden with a private entrance on the outskirts of Tehran. The film opens with Mahin asleep under layers of blankets, waking to a phone call from one of her friends. Tired, she admonishes her friend for waking her knowing that she usually sleeps till noon. Then she is seen having coffee alone with a cigarette. Mahin often invites her friends over, and we can sense how lonely she is during the conversations that take place about how restaurants are very expensive and how those friends’ own weekly gatherings are more and more infrequent, as well as much talk of illness and doctors. But Mahin tirelessly brings the conversation to whether it might possible to find romance at their advanced age.

They are mostly widows like Mahin, who lost her soldier husband and has a daughter now living outside Iran with whom she often has Facetime calls, but to Mahin’s misfortunate, her daughter is very busy with her young children and they can barely complete a single phone call without interruptions. She goes shopping and returns to her loneliness at her home where captivating details are brought to life by cinematographer Mohamad Hadadi. She watches romantic films, puts on makeup while she’s alone and even polishes her nails. But Mahin is not surrendering to her loneliness, she tries to convince her friends to go out sometimes, wakes up to water her plants and even goes alone to the park where she once stood up for a young woman being harassed by the morality police for not covering her hair properly. That’s when Mahin remembers the days when there was no morality police and the hijab was not compulsory. Mahin has a fighter’s spirit, she visits a coffee shop one time alone after her friend refuses her invitation to go out and instead invites her to her home, but she lives on the fourth floor but that’s too hard for Mahin’s knees.

One day while at the pensioners’ restaurants where she is served food using coupons, she pays attention to a lonely man, Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi), finding out from his brief conversation with other guests that he is single, and she trails him till she finds out that he is a taxi driver. Faramarz is an army veteran, so Mahin finds out when she insists on him driving her home paying no attention to how this might look to the nosy neighbours. This is when they steal a moment of happiness along with kind conversations followed by her inviting him to her house to spend the night. That’s when their subtle emotional connection begins. They have a meal together, she bakes him her favourite cake while he fixes the lights of the garden that have been broken for a long time. She even opens a bottle of home-made wine, something very common in Iran since alcohol is prohibited, over which they share their stories about their families and their fear of death.

Regardless of the irony of the film’s ending, the actors’ performance are genuine and brilliant to every last detail. They have their night of romance with Iran’s repressive regime in the background of every detail like the nosy neighbour who knocks on the door to make sure there is no man in the house. It’s a story of love and how people deal with loneliness in old age. The film received the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the FIPRESCI award at Berlin International Film Festival as well as Silver Hugo Award at Chicago International Film Festival.

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Screened in the International Panorama section was the Spanish drama Little Loves directed by Celia Rico Clavellino, which won the Special Jury Award and the Best Supporting Actress Award for Adriana Ozores at Málaga Spanish Film Festival. In 90 minutes Clavellino, best known for Journey to a Mother’s Room (2018), her debut, creates a detailed portrait of a mother and daughter’s confused relationship. At first we see Ani (Adriana Ozores) living alone in her countryside home with her German Shepherd, painting her own building from outside, climbing on a ladder to accomplish the work only to slip and break her leg while walking the dog. Consequently, her daughter Teresa (María Vázques) comes over from Madrid to look after her.

Teresa is in her early 40s and has some minor issues with her mother, but she has to endure some obstacles to help the mother now in a wheelchair who is hard to please.  Teresa cooks for her only to receive critical comments on the food and kitchen care, driving Teresa crazy. This passive-aggressive dynamic between mother and daughter is subtle but appears in the very small details which leaves the viewer wondering what their relationship looked like back in the day. Ani finds out that Teresa is leaving soon for a vacation that she had previously planned, and of course she keeps asking about the details of that trip, eventually finding out Teresa is travelling to Massachusetts with a friend, but when she asks her daughter whether that friend is her boyfriend Teresa refuses to say, simply ignoring the question.

The mother, who seems to be a control freak, starts reviewing pictures of the state of Massachusetts while Teresa as it turns out is in a confused love affair, taking selfies and sending them to her boyfriend with whom she shares the Bee Gees’ Massachusetts. At this point we hear her lying unconvincingly to her mother that she is visiting a friend who lives in the US. Teresa starts to tell her mother that they need help with the housework: a gardener and someone to paint the house from outside, which Ani had begun but not finished. When Terersa finally recruits two workers to come and do the paint, Ani isn’t pleased and wants to interfere with their work all the time and then argues about the price Teresa has agreed on. Till Ani works the deal with Jonas (Aimar Vega) and his father who paints the outside and with a little over the price that Teresa has promised them, she makes the deal with Jonas to paint the interior of the house too. In time, Jonas becomes a family member who reads to Ani and has personal chats with Teresa and joins her listening to music.  

The house ambience takes on life with the arrival of Jonas who wants to become an actor and the mother and daughter seems to be coming together more than ever. One night Teresa goes to a friends gathering with Jonas where she meets his girlfriend who is jealous of her but eventually asks her to accompany her on her trip to the UK. Teresa returns home all wet from the heavy rain and has the most intimate conversation with her mother in which they seem to fix their damaged relationship. The screenplay written also by Clavellino functions through the smallest details in which all the emotions are felt and not spoken, which would have been impossible to deliver without the skilled performance of the two actresses.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 21 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the title: Mothers and daughters