Reading Lolita in Tehran, a new film by Eran Riklis

 Last night, I had the opportunity to attend the Jerusalem premiere screening of Reading Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, based on the best-selling memoir of the same name by Azar Nafisi (published in 2003 and translated into 32 languages). 

Eran Riklis is one of Israel’s most prominent filmmakers. He has made multiple award-winning political films – Cup Final, Zaytun, Syrian Bride, Shelter,Lemon Tree, Dancing Arabs, Human Resources Manager -- all previously reviewed on this blog.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is an extraordinary portrayal of life in Iran during the period following the Islamic Revolution.  The film is sensitive and complex, and the characters are compelling. The story centers on the oppression of women, the banning of Western classics, and the under-lying tension of living with the fear of the knock on the door.

Our main character is the character of Azar Nafisi, herself.  Eran Riklis is obviously attracted to defiant, politically conscious Middle Eastern women – as we have seen previously in Lemon Tree, Shelter, Syrian Bride. Here, Azar is a professor of English literature at the university in Tehran, having recently returned home from America with her husband, both of them optimistic about the possibility of a new life in post-revolutionary Iran.

According to a review by Arash Azizi in The Atlantic, Nafisi’s “book isn’t just about reading and teaching literature under a repressive regime, but about how literature in and of itself could serve as an antidote to all that the regime stood for.” After the crackdown on books and foreign studies, and the oppression of women becomes insufferable, Azar begins to hold a class in her living room for a small group of her female students.  That underground group becomes the center of the film’s story. They talk about literature, about the books’ characters and how they represent things in their own lives. They discuss whether or not their lives could be better elsewhere. They talk about their husbands and their petty jealousies. They console each other and understand each other in a way no man could possibly understand.

According to the filmmaker (who spoke at the  screening last night,) making this film appear authentic was a particular challenge and he decided to use all Iranian actresses (obviously all of them are living abroad). Golshifteh Farahani, who plays Azar, for example, was told to leave Iran in 2008, after a part she played in a controversial film. Perhaps remarkable in itself, all seven of the actresses playing the women in the study group which met in Azar’s living room, attended the world premiere screening at the Rome Film Festival in 2024.

Only a few years after protests rocked Iran under the title “Women, Life, Freedom,” this film provides viewers with an insider’s look at the complexity of life in Iran, especially with regard to  the oppression of women and the resistance of some women to this phenomenon.   It also reminds us all of what it is like to live in an extremely repressive society.

When asked why he made this film as an Israeli film director, Riklis told the audience that he did so as any film director would choose to examine universal human issues.

Watch herethe film’s trailer.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is now playing at cinemas throughout Israel. (The film speaks English and Parsi, with Hebrew subtitles.) 

A new documentary film about military censorship

Another film that I viewed at the Jerusalem Film Festival, this past week, The Soldier’s Opinion, by Assaf Baniff, provides a shocking picture of how the Israeli army regularly violated the privacy of its soldiers, read their letters, analyzed them, and used the material in reports meant for the top brass.  Of course, all soldiers knew that their private letters were being opened and checked for security reasons by the military censor, but no one ever imagined that intimate and sensitive letters were being copied and shared with the highers-up on a regular basis. 

As the army was encouraging soldiers to write their inner secrets and feelings, the censor established entire units of censors. Each military unit had its own censors (many of whom were young women soldiers) who followed the soldiers in their unit personally. 

Using the reports written for the top military officers, the film covers about 50 years of subjects that were outlined and reported on.  It begins with testimony from the battlefield during the War of Independence, the plunder and looting of Arab homes that was prevalent, and the cruelty against the local Arab population, all of which is clearly reflected in many letters by soldiers in the file. But the hatred was not limited towards Arabs, there were extreme feelings and actions against Jews from Kurdistan and Morocco who reportedly felt that the Ashkenazi Jews acted arrogantly and treated them very badly for many years. Following the Six Day War, there were tons of letters reporting the many moral dilemmas which soldiers faced on a regular basis in ruling over the indigenous Palestinian population in the West Bank. This was followed by detailed letters which documented the traumas and deep feelings of soldiers who felt let down by their leadership, especially in the early weeks of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, which became known as “the earthquake” in Israeli society.

Using interviews with some of the women who served in the censorship units, the film portrays a feeling of voyeurism on the one hand, and on the other hand it reveals their feelings that they were reporting on the soldiers’ morale, and protecting them from dangers such as hazing, rancid food, sleep deprivation and sexual abuse. They also were required to report on the use of drugs and on incidents of homosexuality, both of which were handled swiftly by the office of Field Security.

Literally millions of letters were read and used in reports that were distributed to the heads of the IDF and to the political leadership of the state. Some of these reports supposedly greatly influenced Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1998, the office of the censor was closed down because of the end of letter writing.  Today, the army monitors the soldiers’ posts on social media but those posts are meant to be public, and to be read by anyone interested. 

The Soldier’s Opinion (documentary, 55 minutes) is a deeply disturbing look at the almost unbelievable work of the military censor’s office from 1948 to 1998.  In today’s more open society, it is practically inconceivable that the IDF would be able to do such a thing anymore, without widespread public criticism. But, like many of the sins of the past—which were kept secret for a long time—this is part of our history. This courageous film helps us to come to grips with parts of our difficult past.