Reading Lolita in Tehran

An israeli director making a film about Iran already tells whatever is needed to say. Absolutely ridiculous and pathetic to say the very least. This is an insult to human intelligence really, do these guys think we're all sleeping here?! Hahah like an american making a movie about russia.....yeah, NOPE! It doesn't work like that. Golshifteh also a total sellout clearly, these people have no dignity whatsoever. EMBARRASSING.

Each culture has their own moral and values leave them alone.... Not everybody want a western civilization in their homes.... Using contraceptives and hastened lifes... Each culture has its own beauty and value leave it to be.

All fathers want their daughters having a beautiful and peaceful life not a life full of nightlife, boyfriends and alcohol.

Each culture has its own beauty and value leave it to be.

Can art in general and literature, specifically, save the world? Or at least make it better? Or at least create for those who love them - creators and consumers - an inner fortress where they can take refuge in times of hardship or in places where authoritarian systems impose their dictates? This is the question posed by the 2024 film 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' directed by Eran Riklis, an adaptation of the autobiographical book by Azar Nafisi, an Iranian writer living in exile. Definitive answers cannot be given, but the questions themselves open a debate that is more important than ever in times when dictatorships dominate much of the planet and the dangers of sliding towards dictatorship and censorship - political or puritanical - are real in almost every other place in the world.

It is not easy to make a film about the power of words. Another Israeli director, Joseph Cedar, tried with 'Footnote'. Eran Riklis did not seek spectacular effects, emphasizing the narrative and the characters. The cinematic version of Azar Nafisi's memoirs is reorganized into four chapters that capture (not in strict chronological order) four moments of the author's time in Iran. 1980 (the year in which the writer, together with her husband, an engineer, return from America with the hope that they can contribute to building a modern and democratic Iran), 1995, 1988 and 1996. Each of the four sections is named after the title of a book by an important English-language writer that Azar Nafisi shares with her Iranian students: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry James, Jane Austen. She begins her teaching career as a professor at the University during a period of transition. The religious and political pressure of Islamists is increasingly evident and some of her students, supporters of democracy, are arrested, tortured, and a few are executed. The status of women is deteriorating, the wearing of the hijab becomes mandatory, censorship is intensifying. She resigns from her position at the University to return after a few years, finding among her students many young people disappointed and traumatized by their experiences on the front lines of the war between Iran and Iraq. After her second university experience fails, she creates a private literary circle, in which the students are all women. The risks are enormous because all the books studied are banned. Along with good literature, the students learn from her about the taste of freedom and the culture of debate. But can this inner fortress protect the group of women from the world around them? How long will they last, how will they resolve the contradictions between their inner freedom and the oppression that surrounds them? Neither the students nor the teacher can avoid the contradictions and the difficult questions.

Most of the characters are women and the feminist message of the film is clear and strong. The main role is played by Golshifteh Farahani, a beautiful and luminous actress, who radiates with the character's wisdom and compassion. The entire cast of actors and especially actresses, most of whom are Iranian actors living and working in exile, was excellent, even if the other female roles are not that well written and the female characters in the student circle are not differentiated enough. The documentary sequences from the filmed actualities of the time are intelligently inserted and define well the context. The first chapter, which seemed to me the most cohesive, also exposes another important idea. Democracy, with the principles of equality and respect for the citizen and the natural and fundamental rights of every human being, is hard to win, through struggle and suffering, and easy to lose. Azar Nafisi and those around her had placed their hopes in the revolution. They love their country. She and her husband chose to return to their homeland and then tried to continue living there. By creating a bubble of freedom for her students through the reading circle, she opened their eyes and taught them to think independently and to challenge what they consider unfair. The most beautiful scenes of the film seemed to me to be those in which the women share moments of inner freedom, as well as the most intimate confessions, using the words and ideas from the books that had been hidden and forbidden to them until then. Also touching is the connection between the heroine of the film and the mysterious intellectual with whom she secretly exchanges books, avoiding the police who monitor them everywhere. Anyone who has lived under an authoritarian regime can understand these scenes very well. Dictatorships fear the power of the free written word. 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' - for all its cinematic shortcomings - is a tribute to courageous women, in Iran and elsewhere, who fight for their natural rights and to the books that preserve and spread beauty and freedom in their pages.

A literature teacher returns to Iran after the revolution in 1979 and with her own eyes, which get wetter and wetter as the film goes on, sees the changes that happen in her beautiful country and how women suffer injustice, violence, and some of them are violently raped and executed. It looks unbearable but she stays and even continues to teach this banned Western literature in secret. Her story is heartbreaking, and with her eyes we see other stories and broken lives; but what is even more important is that maybe, hopefully, in the future the people of Iran will be able to watch this. As part of their history. As part of their troubled past.

From what I've read here, some may see it as exaggerated or one-sided, especially those who lived through the same time period and came away with different memories or interpretations. But "Reading Lolita in Tehran" isn't trying to offer a comprehensive history of post-revolutionary Iran. It's telling a very specific story, one rooted in the inner lives of women navigating a system that sought to control not only their actions, but their thoughts.

To me, what makes the film truly moving is how these discussions become a lifeline, sort of a rare space where they can finally be themselves, even if only briefly. The idea that some of them couldn't even feel safe being authentic inside their own homes is heartbreaking.

The film quietly captures the suffocation of life under authoritarian patriarchy, the struggle to imagine a future as a woman, the daily negotiations between visibility and safety, and the simmering anger that many men (and the regime itself) seem to harbor toward both women and the West. Yet rather than dramatize these themes, the film presents them with restraint, which makes them feel all the more real and disturbing.

The movie it's not flashy, but it's honest. For anyone interested in the emotional and psychological cost of life under repression, especially from the perspective of women, this film is well worth watching. It's quietly radical, emotionally honest, and deserves more attention than it has received.