Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons opens with an unknown voice informing us that the archives at one concentration camp, which held the names of more than a thousand dead Jewish people, were burned by the Nazis before liberation. Thousands of names destroyed, leaving these people forgotten and merely a number.

Persian Lessons is not your typical holocaust drama. It is a story of survival in which a man is pushed to his extremes in order to stay alive. It is also a film concerned with depicting these characters as real human beings, no matter the side that they were on.

Set in Germany in 1942, Gilles (Nahuel Perez Biscayart, BPM: Beats Per Minute) is a moment away from death when he comes up with the ingenious idea to tell his potential murderers that he is Persian. The lie saves him, but ultimately leads him to another life or death situation. He is sent to a concentration camp and given the job of teaching the Persian language (Farsi) to a Nazi.

The Nazi, Head of Camp Koch (Lars Edinger), is mainly in charge of the kitchen and dreams of moving to Persia to find his brother and open up a restaurant. He is a man that seems to think he is not responsible for the thousands that are dying in his camp. He isn’t doing the actual murdering, he is only feeding the murderers.

Perelman (House of Sand and Fog) does a great job at creating this huge sense of suspense in the first half of the film. This is due to a combination of intense music, sensational acting and because the director knows when to let the audience linger in a scene. We are reminded time and again of the consequences facing our protagonist if he slips up. He makes the viewer wait and immerse themselves in the heavy suspense. We are left breathless for long periods of time, begging Giles to come up with this new language, and most importantly, remember all the words he is teaching.

Whilst this is happening, we are introduced to subplots in which Nazi soldiers are having relations, spreading gossip, and becoming jealous with each other. There are comedic moments introduced in these scenes as well. Perelman presents these soldiers as humans, rather than the mindless villains they are so often depicted as. It is interesting to watch, and ultimately makes the whole event seem even more horrifying. Humans just like you and I committed these acts, and it creates a deeper sense of terror as we look back on these events.

The camp itself is shown as a hopeless place in which nameless humans walk around eating muck and working until they cannot stand any longer. There is a chilling scene in which Gilles is taken to a part of the camp full of rocks and given an axe. We are unsure of what this means until the camera pans out and we see several more Jewish people just picking at rocks with their axe and achieving nothing. A perfect encapsulation of hopelessness.

Ultimately, Gilles is able to succeed in creating this new language through the clever act of naming each word he creates after a Jewish person in the camp. Not only does this make the words easier to remember but it also illustrates the fact that the Nazis fail to remember the names of the Jews and it means that each time Koch is speaking the language he is simultaneously learning the names of his victims. Through this act, Gilles is making them more than just faceless people in the camp.

Persian Lessons would have benefitted with more character development of our protagonist. We are given no prior backstory or potential motives behind his extreme will to survive. The film also spends too much time on the sub-plots involving the Nazis, making the film’s two hour run time feel unnecessary.

The ending is the perfect balance of emotion and satisfaction, benefitted by Biscayart’s tremendous performance. It ultimately reveals the importance of names, the way they are connected with memory, and the importance they have for each individual. Humans should be remembered as a person with a name and not just as another faceless statistic.

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