Persian Lessons (2020) is a film that transcends its historical setting to explore one of the most profound questions of human existence: what does it mean to preserve life and memory in a world built on erasure? Directed by Vadim Perelman, this Holocaust-era tale is as much about language, identity, and the soul as it is about the violence of war. It follows Gilles, a Jewish man arrested in Nazi-occupied France, who escapes death by claiming to be Persian—a lie that spirals into an elaborate and dangerous fiction.
The commandant of the camp, Klaus Koch, is fascinated by Persian culture and dreams of a future far removed from the brutality he oversees. He demands that Gilles teach him Farsi. Faced with the impossible, Gilles invents a new language from scratch, fabricating a full linguistic system day by day, built from his memory and desperation. Each word he creates is connected to a prisoner’s name, turning every lesson into a quiet act of defiance and commemoration.
The narrative operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it is a tense, high-wire act of survival. Beneath it, Persian Lessons becomes a philosophical meditation on language as a vessel of truth, history, and spirit. Gilles’s lie is not merely one of necessity—it evolves into a structure of remembrance, a secret liturgy composed from the names of the lost. In teaching this invented language to his captor, he inverts the dynamic of power: the Nazi officer becomes the student of a Jew, repeating the names of those his system seeks to erase.