Updated July 12, 2026 at 7:40 AM ChST
A film adaptation of Azar Nafisi's critically praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, follows a group of women meeting clandestinely in revolutionary Iran during the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. Gathering in Nafisi's home, they read Western classics, such as 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, Nafisi said, was a way to fight back.
The film begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. More than two decades after publishing her memoir, Nafisi told NPR's Scott Simon about how she felt seeing her story depicted on the big screen.
"I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children," she said.
The film won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival. It stars Iranian actors Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi and Mina Kavani — all of whom, like the author, are exiles from Iran.
Nafisi was delighted to see her students portrayed on the screen. Remembering them now, she saw anew the power of great literature — how it brought together women from diverse backgrounds to her living room every week.
"These girls were very different, one from the other," Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. "Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn't talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect."
Through the stories they read, Nafisi said each could find herself — and become more herself. "It reached a sort of magic," she said.
Nafisi says that kind of magic was shattered by a government that was determined to silence dissent. Nafisi's homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized.
"This wasn't my land," she said. "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 Golshifteh 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 women's place in society. But for Nafisi, it represented an existential threat.
"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 her resistance to covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi says she 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 2003 memoir 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 advocate for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. The new leaders had torn 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 pushed back.
"I thought, how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can't touch the poet," she said.
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