How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet – in spite of anything and everything – they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together.

Sepideh Gholian, in prison since 2018, bakes scones for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s daughter, a pumpkin pie for Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, madeleines for Marzieh Amiri, serving time for a May Day demonstration in 2019. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.