Filmmakers are calling on Iranian authorities to drop charges against directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam, who have been banned from travel.
ADVERTISEMENTIranian directors Behtash Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghadam, whose last collaboration Ballad Of A White Cow premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021, have been banned from travel and face a trial in relation to their upcoming film, My Favourite Cake.
Local media reported that Iranian security forces had raided the house of the film’s editor, seizing rushes and materials related to the production.
The country’s hard-line Islamist authorities are believed to have been angered by the film, which according to the official logline revolves around the “life behind closed doors of an aging woman who dares to live her desires in a country where women’s rights are heavily restricted”.
Now, filmmakers and movie festival organizers from around the world have called on Iranian authorities to drop all charges against the two filmmakers and lift their travel ban.
Moghadam and Sanaeeha had planned to travel to Paris earlier this year for post-production on My Favorite Cake, but authorities confiscated their passports and informed them that they were banned from leaving Iran, said an open letter by PEN America that was signed by 30 filmmakers and artists.
The two were among some 70 Iranian filmmakers and movie industry workers who had joined the hashtag #put_your_gun_down, which was a reference to a violent crackdown during an unrest following the Metropol building collapse in the southwestern city of Abadan that killed at least 41 people in May 2022.
Sanaeeha and Moghadam’s travel ban also anchors itself in the crackdown on artists in Iran, which has intensified in the wake of the Woman Life Freedom protests, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022.
Moghadam has been in the crosshairs of Iran’s authorities in the past, as she was banned from travelling for two years after playing the lead role in Jafar Panahi ’s 2013 clandestinely shot film Closed Curtain.
Both Moghadam and Sanaeeha were also sued by the Revolutionary Guards for the stunning and emotionally devastating Ballad Of A White Cow, which tells the story of a woman who discovers her executed husband was innocent of the charges against him.
The pair were charged with “propaganda against the regime and acting against national security”.
They were later acquitted but the film remains banned in Iran, a country which ranked second on the PEN America 2022 Freedom to Write Index list of the top 10 jailers of writers globally.
