It has taken over 20 years to bring Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, to the screen, and the man who finally got it made was Israeli director Eran Riklis.
The movie is now playing in theaters around Israel and opened to rave reviews in Italy and France a few months ago.
Riklis, one of Israel’s leading directors, is known for his acclaimed prize-winning movies on a diverse range of themes. After he first read the book in 2008, he was impressed. “Even though I understood it’s quite a challenge to adapt it to a movie, I felt it’s my kind of material,” he said.
The book and the movie tell the story of Nafisi (Golshifteh Farahani), an Iranian literature professor who leaves the US with her husband following the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and returns to Tehran, hoping that there would be freedom there following the downfall of the corrupt regime of the shah.
While at first, she thinks she can continue to teach books such as Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to university students, soon she is challenged by Islamic extremist students who question why her course features Western literature.
“Great books are supposed to make you feel uneasy. And make you question what you take for granted,” she tells them, and tries to keep the debate going by putting The Great Gatsby on a mock trial.
But soon, she is forced to wear a hijab on campus, and, not long after that, following riots, she can no longer teach at all – in public. But she satisfies her literary soul by teaching forbidden Western classics to a group of women in her home, including novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
The women in the group bond and open up about their lives, inspired by the literature they are reading. The movie follows some of their stories as they suffer at the hands of the repressive Iranian government. In one especially harrowing sequence, Sanaz (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) is arrested and given 80 lashes when her doctor learns she is not a virgin. Another has an abusive husband, and they all keep the group a secret – there’s no knowing how severe their punishment might be for taking part in it. As she hears what they have suffered, Nafisi struggles over whether to stay in Iran or move back to the US, which means abandoning her mother and friends, as well as her language and culture.
Eran Riklis's various works
Riklis makes movies both in Israel and around the world, and is known for such films as The Syrian Bride, about a young Druze woman and her family in the Golan; Spider in the Web, a spy story starring Ben Kingsley; and A Borrowed Identity (aka Dancing Arabs), an adaptation of a Sayed Kashua novel about an Arab in a Jewish school who struggles to fit in.
Putting aside Reading Lolita in Tehran for years, he came back to it in 2016 and realized he wanted to bring it to life. He found Nafisi on Facebook and met with her to discuss adapting the movie.
“I think the first thing I said was, ‘Are you okay with an Israeli approaching you about adapting your very personal and very Iranian story?’ and she said, ‘Oh, I think it’s a wonderful idea.’” She had seen his movies and had been impressed with them, especially the 2008 Lemon Tree.
“And I felt, oh, we see things the same way,” he said. “I found out that the reason she didn’t give the rights to anyone before was that she felt everyone was too American in a way. They wanted to do a kind of good and evil story, and she felt it’s more complex than that, and I agreed, of course.”
He wrote a script with Marjorie David and started looking for backers for the film. “And then my troubles began,” he said. “All my usual suspects turned me down.”
He had just about given up when he was in Rome for a film festival and met several Italian producers who were intrigued with this idea and backed the movie. As he prepared to turn 21st-century Rome into ’80s-’90s Tehran for the film, he also searched for his ideal cast, which would have to be completely Iranian.
He knew he wanted Golshifteh Farahani for the lead role, since he had worked with her on his 2017 movie, Shelter. Farahani is a brilliant actress who has appeared in international films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. She left Iran after the government threatened her because she acted in the thriller Body of Lies without a hijab, and it had been decades since she made a movie in her native Farsi.
“She said she wasn’t ready to go back to her language, and it was a very emotional thing for her,” he said. Finally, she told him, “Well, you’re never going to find the money anyway, so I’ll say yes for now,” but agreed to star in it when the funds materialized.
He was also able to cast another distinguished name from the Iranian acting diaspora, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for the movie Holy Spider, and also co-directed (with Guy Nattiv) and starred in the movie Tatami. The Iranian-born Israeli singing star Rita also appears in the movie in a key role. The movie’s cast is very strong, and all the actresses do beautiful work in the film.
An adviser helped Riklis, who doesn’t speak Farsi, on the set and in the editing room. But more than just their language skills, the actresses helped the authenticity of the movie by bringing their own experiences to the part.
“That was the biggest challenge I had, having seven women in the room, talking about literature, talking about their life. I had to be really close to them, yet give them their space,” said Riklis. “I learned to respect what they feel as people, not as actors, in terms of what can I use from their personal experiences, without being rude, vis-à-vis what’s happening in the story.”
The collaboration between the director and his actresses may have been a delicate dance, but it works well on the screen.
“I’m an actor’s director, essentially, that’s what really interests me... And in the end, you can have wonderful settings and wonderful camerawork, but you have to believe the people, so I was trying to get the right emotions out at the right moment,” he said.
They were filming the movie just months after the “Woman. Life. Freedom” protests following the killing of Mahsa Amini in police custody in Iran for not wearing her hijab correctly. He knew that people would wonder, as he did, how Nafisi could have left a comfortable life in the US and moved back to Tehran when she did, only to leave again, decades later.
“It’s really about, if you’re in a situation where you feel that everything around you is collapsing, do you stay and fight, or do you leave and fight?” he said, and the movie provides no easy answers.
There will be a US release, although the date has not been set. The movie has been shown at film festivals around America and has picked up prizes.
Riklis said that audiences have connected with the film wherever it’s been shown, even though it’s a rare movie where people talk seriously, and at length, about literature. He worked to make it accessible to audiences who may not be familiar with the books that are being discussed.
“It’s a sophisticated story at its heart, and it’s a literary story but most of all, it’s a story, and it has to be convincing,” he said.