I love a feel-good film that takes you by surprise.

This feels like a December romance story set in Iran and so I made an assumption that it would probably pull its punches to get past censors. I was wrong.

Co-directors Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha (Ballad of a White Cow (2021)) draw us in with the warmly benign story of Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) an affable widow struggling to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. She has a comfortable house but her children are busy with their own families and her friends just talk about their latest ailments.

She takes a chance and invites lonely taxi driver Faramarz (Esmaeel Mehrabi) to her house for cake and wine. Both are major transgressions and we get hints of the morality police, both official and as personified by her neighbours.

I won’t tell you more, suffice to say there is dark and light, genuine belly laughs and stunned silence. It’s definitely a culturally subversive film that was remarkably filmed in Iran. The filmmakers smuggled out the footage for postproduction only to have their passports confiscated. Knowing this adds such a weight of subtext to what we have seen.