Arash Marandi

The cinematic interpretation of Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran is releasing in US theaters on July 10th. Based on Nafisi’s book, which has been translated into 32 languages, the film shares her experience as a literature professor who secretly held a class for seven of her most committed female students. They read and studied banned Western classics like Daisy Miller, Pride and Prejudice, and Nabokov’s Lolita. Reading Lolita in Tehran is perfectly timed in terms of speaking about the harm that systemic gender discrimination, one that denies equal rights to women, does to a society. It is something that continues to be an international issue, and is getting worse in a number of Western countries, including the US.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a wonderful film about Iranian women who are using literature as a guide to their own personal revolutions against the tightening oppression of the Iranian regime. Set after the 1979 revolution and continuing through changing administrative dictates until the late ’80s, the film gives insight into how women have reacted to the increasingly oppressive government and how they fight to retain their own agency, even at their own personal peril. Reading Lolita in Tehran shows that being yourself and holding true to your ideals can be one of the most revolutionary things a person can do.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis’ adaptation of Iranian-American best-selling author and professor of English Azar Nafisi’s acclaimed eponymous memoir about her own experienceds and women’s lives and prospects in post-revolutionary Iran. In the film, Nafisi (brilliantly played by Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband return from America to Iran believing that their beloved homeland has been democratized and is entering a new era of political and cultural freedom. In the film, which is divided into four chapters, each attached to an English literary masterpiece, we see how the circumstances of oppression impact Nafisi and other women in her circle. The film is a The film is galvanizing, heartwrenching and timely study of women’s lives in post-revolution Iran..