Persian Lessons

Persian Lessons (2020) is a war drama from director Vadim Perelman, and you can watch it online on iFILM. In 1942, a Belgian Jew named Gilles dodges a firing squad with one desperate lie: he claims to be Persian, not Jewish.

The lie only buys him time. The camp's cook, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), plans to open a restaurant in Tehran once the war ends, and he wants to learn Farsi first. So Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) becomes his tutor. The catch: Gilles doesn't speak a word of it. Every night he invents fake vocabulary and has to remember his own inventions better than his pupil does. One slip and he's dead.

The story is fiction, drawn from a Wolfgang Kohlhaase tale, and it plays out as a two-man duel across the wire rather than a battlefield epic. Eidinger makes Koch genuinely fond of the prisoner teaching him, which is exactly what makes it so unsettling. A quiet film that lands harder than most loud ones. Stream Persian Lessons (2020) online on iFILM.