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Reading Lolita in Tehran is about to become a Motion Picture ...
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http://www.payvand.com/news/08/nov/1056.html
Payvand's Iran News ...
11/07/08
PARTNERS ON LOLITA
By Darius KADIVAR
Deepa Mehta and Azar Nafisi Team Up for Miramax and Participant Co-production based on Iranian Author's Best Selling Novel
photocomposition © DK & ©imdb.com & © participant® & © TORONTO STAR/RICK MADONIK (For Deepa Mehta)& Iranian.com pictory
Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran is about to become a Motion Picture directed by Oscar Nominee director Deepa Mehta based on a screenplay co-written jointly by the Iranian author Nafisi, and, Canadian Indian director Mehta. The film co produced by ebay™ Co-Founder and entrepreneur turned film producer, Jeff Skoll, will certainly be a highly expected motion picture which will certainly break stereotypes and misconceptions about Iran and Iranians in the lines of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis or Stephan Caghan's Syriana.
Published in 2003, Reading Lolita in Tehran was on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has since been translated into thirty-two languages. The book is a memoir of the experience of Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi who returned to Iran during the revolution of 1979 and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. It narrates her teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, her refusal to submit to the rule to wear the veil and her subsequent expulsion from the university, life during the Iran-Iraq war, her return to teaching at the University of Allameh Tabatabei (1981), her resignation (1987), the formation of her book club (1995-97), and her decision to ultimately emigrate. Events are interlaced with the stories of book club members consisting of seven of her female students, who met weekly at Nafisi's house to discuss controversial works of Western literature and are interpreted through the books they read.
Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita From which derives Azar Nafisi's Book title was subject to two famous films respectively by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 and Adriane Lyne in 1998 ©imdb.com ©TIME & photocomposition ©DK
The Book:
Nafisi's account is divided into four sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen".
"Lolita" deals with Nafisi as she resigns from The University of Tehran and starts her private literature class with students Mitra, Nassrin, Azin, Sanaz and Manna. They talk not just about Lolita, but One Thousand and One Nights and Invitation to a Beheading. The main themes are oppression, jailers as revolutionary guards try to assert their authority through certain events such as a vacation gone awry and a runaway convict.
"Gatsby" is set about eleven years before "Lolita" just as the Iranian revolution starts. The reader learns how some Iranians' dreams, including the author's, became shattered through the government's imposition of new rules. Nafisi's student Mr. Nyazi puts the novel on trial, claiming that it condones adultery. Chronologically this is the first part of Nafisi's story. The Great Gatsby and Mike Gold's works are discussed in this part. The reader meets Nassrin.
[ ... ]
The Movie Project:
While promoting her latest film Heaven on Earth at the Royal York Hotel last July, Filmmaker Deepa Mehta at a press conference for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), added a touch of glamour to a media bash that needed some, Mehta revealed, almost as an aside, a future project that could earn her as much international acclaim as Water, nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign-Language Film.
"My next movie is going to be Reading Lolita in Tehran, for Miramax," Mehta remarked almost casually, as if she didn't really expect anyone to recall that Azar Nafisi's breakthrough memoir happens to be one of the hottest, most prestigious literary properties of the past decade."I'm quite thrilled about it. I'm really lucky. It's a book that I've always admired," Mehta said.
[ ... ]
About the Author: Darius KADIVAR is a Freelance Journalist, Film Historian, and Media Consultant. He is also contributes to OCPC Magazine in LA/US and to the London Based IC Publications The Middle East Magazine and Persian Heritage Magazine.
... Payvand News - 11/07/08
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