Persian Lessons (2020)
(Persischstunden)
Country: RUS/GER/BYEL
Technical: col/2.66:1 127m
Director: Vadim Perelman
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Lars Eidinger, Jonas Nay
Synopsis:
A French Jew survives much of the war in a transit camp by virtue of the fact that he pretends to be Persian: the camp catering officer desires to learn Farsi, so that he can join his brother in Tehran after the war and open a restaurant.
Review:
A moving and poetically just drama that may or may not lose in those qualities if you take into account that it is a fiction, depending on your stance on such things. The politicking within the camp soldiery is well caught, and the central relationship is not without ambivalence, but for some the humanisation of German characters while countless prisoners go unnamed will be too much to take. That said, the film's closing gambit of having two very different scenes necessitating the recall of the prisoner's bogus vocabulary goes some way towards redressing that imbalance.
(Persischstunden)
Country: RUS/GER/BYEL
Technical: col/2.66:1 127m
Director: Vadim Perelman
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Lars Eidinger, Jonas Nay
Synopsis:
A French Jew survives much of the war in a transit camp by virtue of the fact that he pretends to be Persian: the camp catering officer desires to learn Farsi, so that he can join his brother in Tehran after the war and open a restaurant.
Review:
A moving and poetically just drama that may or may not lose in those qualities if you take into account that it is a fiction, depending on your stance on such things. The politicking within the camp soldiery is well caught, and the central relationship is not without ambivalence, but for some the humanisation of German characters while countless prisoners go unnamed will be too much to take. That said, the film's closing gambit of having two very different scenes necessitating the recall of the prisoner's bogus vocabulary goes some way towards redressing that imbalance.
(Persischstunden)
Country: RUS/GER/BYEL
Technical: col/2.66:1 127m
Director: Vadim Perelman
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Lars Eidinger, Jonas Nay
Synopsis:
A French Jew survives much of the war in a transit camp by virtue of the fact that he pretends to be Persian: the camp catering officer desires to learn Farsi, so that he can join his brother in Tehran after the war and open a restaurant.
Review:
A moving and poetically just drama that may or may not lose in those qualities if you take into account that it is a fiction, depending on your stance on such things. The politicking within the camp soldiery is well caught, and the central relationship is not without ambivalence, but for some the humanisation of German characters while countless prisoners go unnamed will be too much to take. That said, the film's closing gambit of having two very different scenes necessitating the recall of the prisoner's bogus vocabulary goes some way towards redressing that imbalance.