After completing the ninth grade in Tehran, Lily was sent to France to attend a boarding school run by Dominican nuns. This transition marked her first serious confrontation with loneliness, cultural displacement, and emotional separation. After one year, she moved to Paris and spent three years there.
Paris in the 1960s was at the epicenter of intellectual revolution—existentialism, cinematic modernism, political radicalism, and feminist awakening. While these movements shaped her worldview, her personal experience was far from glamorous. She struggled with isolation, homesickness, and a deep sense of emotional abandonment.
Nevertheless, her access to European cinema proved transformative. She attended film festivals such as the Venice Film Festival and encountered towering figures of world cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut.
One of the most extraordinary moments of her youth occurred when her father introduced her personally to Godard and Truffaut at a Paris restaurant—an encounter that symbolized how deeply art had saturated even her private life.
