Eran Riklis, Italy / Israel, 2024, 107 min., feature film, original version with English subtitles
In the mid-1990s, literature professor Azar Nafisi secretly invites her students to a reading circle in Tehran. While the morality police and fundamentalists dictate everyday life, Austen, Fitzgerald, and Nabokov become companions of inner freedom and a space of security in the middle of Nafisi’s living room. The film tells of love for one’s homeland and the chains of the regime, of the dream of revolution that turns into oppression—and of the safe space that literature opens up. Nafisi’s living room becomes a place of resistance where women are allowed to dream, love, and hope. A powerful drama about self-determination, intellect, and the courage to defend intellectual freedom—even if the price is exclusion, exile, and deep inner conflict.
LOLITA READING IN TEHRAN celebrated its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival and its German premiere at the Leipzig Film Art Fair. Additional festival screenings took place at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Miami Film Festival. At the Rome Film Festival, the film received the Audience Award as well as the Special Jury Prize for the female cast.
