Premiering as missiles fly, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’ rewrites Israeli-Iranian script

On October 1, director Eran Riklis was preparing for the Italian premiere of his latest film, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” about a subversive Iranian book club. It was an inauspicious moment: Israel had just been attacked by hundreds of ballistic missiles fired from Iran, escalating fears of war.

Nearly one month later, on October 19, Riklis was in Italy, onstage alongside most of the film’s Iranian cast, to receive two awards at the Rome Film Fest, an audience choice award and a special jury prize for the movie’s actresses.

Days later, on October 26, Israel delivered its promised reprisal for the missile barrage, hitting Iranian military assets during an hours-long attack.

The award was something of a vindication for Riklis, who spent years trying to make the film based on the award-winning memoir by Azar Nafisi. With Israel convulsed by war and facing increased international criticism for its military actions, getting the movie onto the festival circuit has also been a challenge, with many Israeli artists and creations getting short shrift on the world stage.

“It’s very symbolic; it means that the Italian audience sat there and saw the film and wasn’t afraid of certain truths,” Riklis told the Times of Israel in an interview several days after the Rome ceremony.

The film had been rejected by several other festivals, though Riklis said it was difficult to fight those turning the film down without knowing the reason why. In some cases, the film was accepted, while some organizers expressed concerns about being subjected to anti-Israel protests should they screen the movie.

From ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran,’ which premiered at the Rome Film Festival on October 27 (Courtesy of Reading Lolita)

“Maybe they simply didn’t like the film,” he said of the rejections. “I don’t fear anything personally. The film is my statement. If people want to blame Israel for Gaza or the Palestinians, then let’s sit down and talk.”

The film will premiere in Israel around February, said Riklis.

Published in English in 2003, “Reading Lolita in Tehran” tells the story of Nafisi, an English literature professor and writer who returned to Iran from studying abroad in 1979, just as the Islamic Revolution was transforming the pro-Western state into a radical theocracy.

As part of her resistance to the new regime, she formed a secret book club with seven of her University of Tehran students, meeting at her house to discuss works of Western literature.

Riklis immediately thought about making it into a film after he read the memoir, but was about to start work on the award-winning film “The Human Resources Manager,” which came out in 2010.

Now 70, Riklis has been making films for some 40 years. For the last two decades, his films have focused on stories that deal with expansive conflicts by bringing them down to the human level.

His previous films include “The Syrian Bride,” “Lemon Tree” and “Dancing Arabs” which all tackle the Arab and Druze experience in Israel. So he felt he understood how to make a film about Iranians in Tehran.

In 2017, a decade after first reading the book, which has been translated into Hebrew and dozens of other languages, Riklis noticed it on his shelf and got in touch with Nafisi, now living in Washington, DC.

“She told me the rights were available but she hadn’t agreed to various [adaptation] attempts in the past,” said Riklis. “I asked her if made sense that an Israeli director would handle her story and she said it made fantastic sense.”

Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi and the cover of her book, ‘Reading Lolita in Tehran,’ whose film adaptation premiered in Rome on October 27, 2024 (Courtesy Penguin Random House)

Within a week, Riklis was in Nafisi’s home, obtaining the rights to make the film.

Nafisi told Riklis that she had been impressed by his 2008 film “Lemon Tree,” about a Palestinian widow in the West Bank protecting her rights. “The man who can tell the story of a Palestinian woman can tell my story,” Riklis quoted Nafisi saying.

Nafisi did not respond to requests for an interview with The Times of Israel, but she has made similar comments in other media appearances.

Riklis began pitching the story to producers in 2019, and his first backer was Moshe Edery of United King Films, who had supported other Riklis films. The late Michael Sharfshtein was also an initial backer.

“Moshe is very intuitive and even though he’s not on my side of the political map, he has an extremely open mind,” said Riklis. “He loved it and backed me up to get the script done.”

Riklis looked for other backers to fund the movie, though his usual sources in France and Germany weren’t interested. When he was in Italy in 2021 for an event, two Italian producers expressed interest, with the final funding coming from Italy and Israel’s state-supported Rabinovich Foundation.

Riklis promised himself to only cast Iranian actors, knowing there was enough Iranian talent outside Iran, with many expatriates living in London and Berlin, Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

The cast of “Reading Lolita” includes Golshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mina Kavani, Lara Wolf, Isabella Nefar and Raha Rahbari.

Riklis had directed Farahani in the 2017 “Shelter,” and Amir Ebrahimi had co-directed the 2002 judoka thriller “Tatami” with Guy Nattiv, which marked the first collaboration by Iranian and Israeli filmmakers.

“Sometimes it sounds crazy, an Israeli director for an Iranian film,” said Riklis. “But Iranians and Israelis have no problem with dialoguing with one another.”

Riklis said he would have preferred to shoot the film in Israel, but that didn’t work with a cast of ex-Iranians, and he opted for Rome, which is also a hub for former Iranians.

The film is about Iran in the 1980s and 1990s, but for Riklis, it’s really about oppression around the globe.

“Oppression exists in most places in the world, or it’s coming,” said Riklis. “There’s a right-wing surge in America, in Europe, in Israel, societies are in friction.”

Riklis completed filming “Reading Lolita” in the summer of 2023 and was still editing the film in Israel on October 7, when the massive Hamas terrorist attack took place in Israel’s south, killing more than 1,200 people. He finished post-production work on the film throughout the months of war with Hamas. By the time the film was screened in Rome, the fighting had only expanded, with Israel taking on Hezbollah in Lebanon and facing direct attacks from Iran for the first time ever.

“It’s our story as Israelis, you learn to live with it,” he said. “It’s the tragedy of the Middle East and beyond. As artists, we have to somehow go beyond it and dig into real stories of people in these places in the hope that they’ll be understood.”