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Gilles, a young Belgian Jew, claims to be a Persian to survive at the concentration camp where one of the officers dreams about learning Persian language. Gilles starts to give lessons to the German by coming up with new words on an ongoing basis. An ambiguous bond starts to form between the two. On the one hand, Vadim Perelman’s film is a poignant story, respectful of the victims’ suffering, about a man who has been reduced to the will of biological survival, deprived of his own language and past, and yet is a self-appointed guardian of the memory of those murdered. On the other hand, the almost comical accumulation of unbelievable coincidences and the surreal starting point make “Persian Lessons” a successful attempt at finding a new language in which the evil of the Holocaust can only be described by means of irony and absurdity.

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