Throughout the two days preceding her long-awaited wedding, amid the flurry of arriving relatives and the preparation of a seemingly endless array of colorful, culinary delights, young bride-to-be Pasandide (Negar Javaherian) finds herself the center of attention. The event also proves an occasion for extended family to reconnect, reminisce and rejoice in the pleasures of familiar company. The family compound of aged Uncle Ezzatolah (Saeed Poursamimi) proves an ideal site for this summer reunion among three generations, with its lush courtyard gardens, labyrinthine parlors and passageways and erratic electrical system (subject to untimely city blackouts). Some of the most powerful moments in Reza Mirkarimi’s film occur during intimate gatherings, as the family’s women cook, sew, gossip and tease, reveling in the reassuring power of their own collective. Mirkarimi captures all these proceedings in breathtaking images, compositions that find sublime forms in slow-motion sequences as remarkable for their visual splendor as for Mohammad Reza Aligholi’s sensual score. Faced with great adversity, the love shared among the myriad members of A Cube of Sugar’s middle-class Iranian clan endures as a testament to the power of ties that bind—long after the lights come back on. –SFIFF
