Director: Eran Riklis
Adapted from Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2024) follows a literature professor who turns her living room into a secret classroom during a period of tightening restrictions on daily life and public expression.
What is Reading Lolita in Tehran about?
As morality patrols conduct unpredictable raids across the city and hardline authorities tighten their grip on university life, professor Azar Nafisi loses her ability to teach the way she once did. Rather than give up on literature altogether, she invites six of her most dedicated former students into her own apartment for a private, unofficial reading group. Meeting away from prying eyes, the women work through banned Western novels by Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen, discussing the books with a bluntness they've rarely been allowed elsewhere. Removing their veils inside the privacy of Nafisi's home becomes its own quiet statement, and the stories they read start to blend with their own lives: questions about desire, ambition, and self-determination raised by long-dead novelists suddenly feel urgent and personal. Each woman brings a different relationship to risk, family expectation, and independence, and the group dynamic shifts as their individual circumstances outside the apartment grow more precarious. Director Eran Riklis frames the sessions as an intimate act of resistance built entirely around conversation and books rather than confrontation, letting the tension of the outside world seep in through what the women choose to say, and choose to leave unsaid, to one another.
Cast & crew
Golshifteh Farahani leads the ensemble as Azar Nafisi, with Zar Amir Ebrahimi among the students who join her reading circle. Mina Kavani, Bahar Beihaghi, Isabella Nefar, and Raha Rahbari fill out the group, with Lara Wolf and Shahbaz Noshir in supporting roles.
Context & significance
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and adapts Azar Nafisi's internationally bestselling 2003 memoir of the same name, condensing years of clandestine gatherings into a single dramatic narrative. It was produced as an Israeli-Italian co-production, released in 2024 to festival circuits before a broader rollout.
Where & how to watch
Reading Lolita in Tehran streams on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Persian subtitles available, so viewers can choose whichever fits their preference. Watching only requires logging into a free K-Time account, on a platform built with Farsi navigation and the diaspora audience in mind from the ground up.