Persian Lessons

Set in occupied France in 1942, Persian Lessons follows Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a Belgian Jew, who narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he’s Persian, not Jewish. While the lie temporarily saves him, Gilles is then assigned the extraordinary task of teaching Farsi, a language he doesn’t know, to Koch (Lars Eidinger), the officer in charge of the camp’s kitchen who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an inspired and clever deception, Giles not only manages to survive, but also devises an astonishing strategy to remember the names of his condemned brethren.

Partially inspired by German writer Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s short story Erfindung einer Sprache (Invention of a Language), PERSIAN LESSONS tells an incredibly suspenseful story about the creativity and bravery one man utilized to survive the Holocaust. Further, the fabricated version of Farsi spoken by Biscayart was invented by a Russian philologist who used the actual names of documented Holocaust victims as a basis for the film’s vocabulary.