On Monday, December 5, the Institute welcomed acclaimed filmmaker Vadim Perelman via Zoom for a Q&A about his newest film, Persian Lessons, hosted by IIJS Film Series Coordinator Stuart Weinstock.
In Persian Lessons, Gilles, a Belgian Jew, is arrested by the SS and narrowly avoids execution by swearing that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but also traps him in an apparently-impossible job: teaching Farsi to Koch, the SS officer in charge of the camp's kitchen, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. To stay alive, Gilles must invent a language from scratch, word by word, while also navigating the daily tortures and terrors of the concentration camp. Persian Lessons is the latest film by Vadim Perelman, the director of the Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog.
Persian Lessons is based on a 1977 short story, “Erfindung einer Sprache” (“Invention of a Language”), by Wolfgang Kolhaase. The short story is available to read in English here.