Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ new movie, Studying Lolita in Tehran.
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Marie Gioanni/Greenwich Leisure
A movie adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s critically praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Studying Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The movie, directed by Eran Riklis, follows a gaggle of ladies assembly clandestinely in revolutionary Iran throughout the mid-Nineties, to learn forbidden books. Gathering in Nafisi’s dwelling, they learn Western classics, resembling Madame Bovary, The Nice Gatsby, Pleasure and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Schooling had develop into harmful and even lethal throughout the Islamic Revolution, and studying forbidden books, Nafisi stated, was a strategy to battle again.
The movie begins with Nafisi as a college professor and ends along with her exiled from her homeland. Greater than 20 years after publishing her memoir, Nafisi advised NPR’s Scott Simon about how she felt seeing her story depicted on the large display.
“I really feel in direction of it the best way I really feel in direction of my youngsters,” she stated.
The movie gained the the Viewers Award and a particular jury prize on the 2024 Rome Movie Competition. It stars Iranian actors Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Mina Kavani — all of whom, just like the creator, are exiles from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Studying Lolita in Tehran.
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Nafisi was delighted to see her college students portrayed on the display. Remembering them now, she noticed anew the facility of nice literature — the way it introduced collectively ladies from various backgrounds to her front room each week.
“These women have been very totally different, one from the opposite,” Nafisi stated of the scholars who studied along with her in Tehran. “Exterior the classroom, they most likely would not discuss to at least one one other. However in that class, they discovered to speak and to attach.”
By way of the tales they learn, Nafisi stated every might discover herself — and develop into extra herself. “It reached a form of magic,” she stated.
Nafisi says that form of magic was shattered by a authorities that was decided to silence dissent. Nafisi’s homeland modified shortly into a spot she barely acknowledged.
“This wasn’t my land,” she stated. “This was a rustic dominated by a regime that stoned individuals to loss of life.”
When the non secular hardliners within the authorities banned ladies from showing in public with no headband, the movie reveals Nafisi, performed by Golshifteh Farahani, agonizing in entrance of a mirror with a black headband.
“The expression on her face is worry, as a result of by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi stated.
For some, the headband was a logo of ladies’s place in society. However for Nafisi, it represented an existential menace.
“This isn’t a political battle. That is an existential one,” she stated. “Our id as human beings, as ladies, has been taken away from us.”
When her resistance to masking her hair turned too harmful, Nafisi says she discovered small methods to insurgent. “I by no means wore my scarf correctly. I might at all times present a couple of strands out of the headscarf to inform them, ‘You do not personal me.’ “
Nafisi’s 2003 memoir about preventing the Iranian Revolution by means of the straightforward act of studying was a world bestseller, gained quite a few literary awards, and was named as one of many “100 Finest Books of the Decade” by The Occasions (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to advocate for the position of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the start of the Islamic Revolution. The brand new leaders had torn down the statues of the king and the royal household and altered the names of streets. However once they tried to convey down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi and erase his place of honor inside the tradition, the individuals pushed again.
“I assumed, how improbable that they’ll convey down the statue of the Shah, however they can not contact the poet,” she stated.
