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5 votes
An ordinary high school turns into an ordinary model of a totalitarian state. The trivial story of the mysterious theft of a VCR turns into a grotesque and gloomy farce when interim director Viktor Andreyevich, with a callous dictatorial hand, terrorises students and teachers. And now the young "patriots" punish peers-"dissidents", joining the ranks of the "pioneer-jugend." And an ordinary school laboratory turns into a place for torture...
Status
Released
Original Language
RU

Irina Sysoyeva
As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.