A new film version of Azar Nafisi's critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi's home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi's way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, "I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children."
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
"These girls were very different, one from the other," Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
"Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn't talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect," she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. "It reached a sort of magic," she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi's homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
"This wasn't my land," she told Simon. "This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death."
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
"The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment," Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
"This is not a political fight. This is an existential one," she said. "Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us."
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. "I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, 'You don't own me.'"
Nafisi's book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the "100 Best Books of the Decade" by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
"I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can't touch the poet," she said.
Copyright 2026 NPR
