Close-Up (1990)

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Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world.

a brilliant exploration of the power of movies, close-up reconstructs a cinephile's attempt to literally become a filmmaker he admires. "the film so subtly transmutes our normal sense of what movies can do," godfreay cheshire writes in the new york press, "that we are ultimately left defenseless against the extraordinary power of its final scenes, which are as transcendent - and as shrewd - as anything in cinema."

abbas kiarostami is one of the most revered filmmakers in the world. the other films he has directed include taste of cherry (palme d'or, cannes film festival).