Reading Lolita In Tehran

While the Islamic morality police stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and religious fundamentalists take universities by storm, Azar Nafisi secretly gathers some of his most committed students in his classroom to read Western literary classics. Unaccustomed to saying what's on their minds, they soon remove their veils and constraints and their stories begin to intersect with those of the heroines of novels by Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. In this protected space, they can dream, desire and love, as opposed to the political, moral and personal persecution of which they are hostages in their daily reality.