Persian Lessons

The film is set during the Second World War in a German concentration camp.

A Jewish man (Gilles) tells the commandant that he had a mother from Belgium and a father from Iran. The deputy commandant is intrigued and asks to be taught Persian, but the man is lying and he cannot speak Persian.[3] However the claim earns him a place in the kitchen performing light duties, an enviable position, where the guards are mainly female, but arguably more cruel than the male guards (the main female character Elsa is modelled on the true-life character Elsa Ehrich)

The deputy commandant wishes to learn four words per day. Guessing the war will last two more years he hopes to learn 2,000 words. He hopes to visit Teheran when the war is over. One of the junior guards warns the commandant that the man is simply a Jew.

The deputy commandant gives him a list of 40 words to translate, but no pencil. He must come to his office later and the commandant will write them down. He escapes when taking out slop from the kitchen and meets a French man in a wood (this is not explained) who advises him to return, which he does. Before he writes the 40 words he is asked to neatly record in a ledger the names of prisoners dying en route to the camp. This seems to be to disguise any future investigation which may discover the deputy commandant's writing style. Gilles sees a way of using the ledger as an aid memoir to remember the 40 words, using sections of the names of the dead. This works and he can recite all 40 words without the list as he still has the ledger in front of him.

Gilles has to serve a group of officers tomato soup in the woods near the camp. Here he makes his first mistake saying that the word "radz" means "tree", but he already used this word to mean "bread". Koch beats him badly, suspecting a lie. Gilles pleads that tree and bread are the same word. The next day he is sent to work in the stone quarry instead of the kitchen: a back-breaking task.

On the second day at the quarry he collapses and is taken back to the camp by a Kapo. In hospital he admits to the doctor that he made up the language, after he was mumbling his invented words in his fever.

On recovery Koch apologises to him and says he over-reacted.

Other officers complain of Koch's behaviour and want one of the female guards reinstating as book-keeper. He has to meet the commandant to explain. He says he knows who is spreading the rumours and he says that the same officer spreads rumours that the commandant has a small penis.

The lessons become more complicated when he is asked to explain short sentences and grammar. Koch explains he dreamed of being a chef, but he ended up in charge of the kitchens in the concentration camp.

While Gilles is out in the countryside gleaning in fields (collecting leftover crops after harvest), a female officer does the book-keeping. Gilles' trick is almost revealed when she leaves a ruler in the ledger leaving only the pseudo-Persian words exposed. Elsa, who is not well-liked, is re-posted to the Russian front.

Gilles starts to struggle to find new words. He asks the prisoners queuing for soup their names and uses sections to make new words. Passing these to Koch, Koch describes it as a "wonderful language".

Back on light duties Gilles feels guilty as he sees fellow prisoners being beaten outside.

From what he has learned so far Koch writes a poem in Persian and reads it to Gilles. Gilles truly likes it. Koch asks him to now call him Klaus and gives him extra food rations which he takes for the man he saw beaten earlier. The beaten man's brother says he owes Gilles and will protect him because if Gilles dies then his brother dies.

A new consignment of prisoners contains an English RAF pilot, but it appears he is of Persian descent. He does not speak German. The junior officer Max drags Gilles to the barracks to confront him with the new man but when they get there Gilles' protector has cut his throat so he cannot be confronted. Max guns down the protector. Koch apologises to Gilles that the Persian speaker was killed as it prevented a three-way conversation. Gilles says he is tired of being afraid.

In the barracks Gilles and the beaten man swap coats.

The largest consignment of prisoners is walked to the train station. Over dinner Koch is told his protégé is being loaded on a train and he rushes to rescue him, pulling him out of the group. But the inevitable is fast approaching. The Americans are close. The commandant orders his officers to destroy all records and execute the remaining prisoners. Koch removes Gilles from the barracks, Max follows them but cannot go beyond the security gate. He goes to tell the commandant but he takes no interest as he is busy burning the ledgers.

In the woods Koch and Gilles split. Koch has a small plane waiting 10km away to take him to Istanbul. He wishes Gilles a "good life" in pseudo-Persian.

Koch arrives in Tehran under the name of Marcel Gallant, using a forged Belgian passport. He becomes agitated when customs officials - who state that he is speaking "gibberish" - do not understand his Persian. They suspect he may be German and arrest him after a struggle.

Gilles is interviewed in French by the Americans. They say all the records are destroyed. Gilles says he does not know all the names of the 25,000 to 30,000 who passed through the camp; but he knows the full names of 2,840 people (whom he used to create the new language), and recites them to the authorities.

• Nahuel Pérez Biscayart as Gilles
• Lars Eidinger as Depute Commandant Klaus Koch
• Jonas Nay as Max Beyer
• David Schütter as Paul
• Alexander Beyer as Camp Commandant
• Andreas Hofer as Adjutant von Dewitz
• Leonie Benesch as Elsa Strumfp
• Giuseppe Schillaci as Marco Rossi

The script of the film was first written in Russian, and then translated into English and eventually German. The fake version of Persian spoken in the film was invented by a Russian philologist at Moscow State University, who based the vocabulary on the real names of documented victims of the Holocaust.[4][5][6][7]

Persian Lessons premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on 22 February 2020.[8] In December 2020, Russia submitted the film to the 78th annual Golden Globes competition.[9] The film was released in China on 19 March 2021.[10]

• List of submissions to the 93rd Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film
• List of Belarusian submissions for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film

• Persian Lessons at IMDb