Reading Lolita in Tehran: Preview Club Wrap-Up

by JBFC Director of Special Programs and Strategic Partnerships Chris Holliday

As part of the JBFC Preview Club, subscribers get an exclusive first look at the most interesting new indies and foreign films on our “New Releases” horizon. Every month, JBFC programmers present a special “secret” screening of an anticipated new film release before it is available to the public. After the screening, our programmers open the floor for a robust audience discussion and send Club members a wrap-up note with behind-the-scenes details and fun facts about the film they just watched.

As a special treat, we have decided to make these notes public. Beware, there may be spoilers!

Preview Club Wrap-up for Reading Lolita in Tehran, presented by JBFC Director of Special Programs and Strategic Partnerships Chris Holliday on Tuesday, July 7, 2026:

Hi everyone,

It was wonderful to see you last Tuesday for the kick-off to our new season of Preview Club, and it’s always a pleasure to fill the shoes of your regular host and my colleague in the Programming team, Ian LoCascio.

About the Film

The film we watched was Reading Lolita in Tehran, courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment. The film is based on Azar Nafisi’s memoir of the same name, which spent over 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list after its 2003 publication, and has since been translated into more than 30 languages.

It tells the true story of a literature professor in revolutionary Iran who, amid censorship and religious extremism, gathers seven of her most dedicated female students for a secret book club devoted to banned literary classics—Lolita among them.

The film won the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival and played in European cinemas last year, but struggled to find US theatrical distribution before Greenwich Entertainment picked it up, giving us the chance to see it on the big screen. Many thanks to Greenwich for providing the film, which will open for a run at the JBFC at the end of the month.

The adaptation is directed by Eran Riklis, who worked on the script with Nafisi herself, alongside American screenwriter Marjorie David, whose television credits range from Hill Street Blues to Chicago Hope.

Riklis’s previous films Lemon Tree, The Syrian Bride, and Shelter have all told defiant stories of Middle Eastern women from different walks of life, and this film continues that trend. What sets it apart is its intimacy—much of it owed to his collaboration with cinematographer Hélène Louvart, known for her handheld, close-up work on films like The Beaches of Agnès and Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Riklis has spoken about an early decision he and Louvart made together: the camera would function not as an outside observer, but as another presence in the room—embedded in the women’s world rather than looking in on it. That philosophy shows up most clearly in the film’s reliance on the close-up. Riklis has said he believes the human face is “a map of the soul,” and that conviction is felt in nearly every scene set inside Nafisi’s apartment, where the camera lingers on the students’ faces as they read aloud, tracking the flicker of recognition or discomfort a line from Lolita may produce.

That intimacy carries through visually as well. The living room scenes are lit warmly and shot close, often with tables of fruit and pastries filling the frame—a sensory abundance deliberately contrasted with the greyer, more clinical framing of the university halls and streets patrolled by the morality squads outside.

As we discussed on Tuesday, there are some wonderful performances in the film that really help carry the story. The ensemble is led by Golshifteh Farahani as Nafisi, alongside Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mina Kavani, and others—all Iranian actors living in exile, performing a story about a country they can no longer return to. It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. Women who left Iran because of the very repression the film depicts, now recreating that world on the streets of Rome, where most of the film was shot, since filming in Iran itself was not possible (big shout out to the Production Design team!). The actors’ performances draw on both research and, presumably, lived memory, and it gives certain scenes—the raids, the sudden hush when a knock comes at the door—a particular weight and realism.

Each of the seven students in that reading group carries a different relationship to freedom—some devout, some secular, some desperate to leave Iran, others unable to imagine leaving. The film, like the book, resists flattening them into a single symbol of “oppressed women,” and that refusal feels like the point. One of the running tensions in Nafisi’s memoir is her frustration with Western audiences wanting a simple story: veiled women, evil regime, done. The real story is messier—complicity, small rebellions, competing loyalties within families, and disagreement even inside the reading group about what freedom actually means. I appreciated that the film doesn’t shy away from that complexity.

Watching this film in 2026, given where things stand politically with Iran, adds another layer. Riklis uses mirrors as a recurring motif, particularly around the veil; there’s an image of Farahani, as Nafisi, looking into a mirror, first putting on her headscarf, then taking it off. That gesture lands differently today than it might have a decade ago, after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and the protests that followed. For those unfamiliar, Amini was an Iranian woman who died after being detained by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating mandatory hijab rules; her death sparked months of unrest in which many people were killed and thousands detained. The film doesn’t comment on this directly—it’s a historical piece—but the connection to the present is hard to miss.

That’s why I feel that this is a story worth watching today, and it was my pleasure to present it at this month’s Preview Club. I know some of you expressed how you’d like to watch it again. Having watched it three times now, I can confirm that you pick up different subtleties the more you watch it. We open it for a run on July 31, and tickets will be on sale soon.

Thanks, as always, for your continued support of the JBFC. Ian will be back next month, and I hope to catch you at the theater again soon.

Best,

Chris

Reading Lolita in Tehran opens for a run at the JBFC Theater on Friday, July 31.

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