Close up

Jobless, obsessive film lover Hossein Sabzian cannot resist the temptation to pass himself off as the film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to give himself credibility with a bourgeois Iranian family. "Love of the cinema, and its importance in the life of Sabzian, a film director with no work to his name […], are on trial here. But not to question the supposed barrier between truth and lies, fiction and documentary, life and art. […] No, Close up takes Sabzian's part entirely – the part of fiction: nothing but the cinema." Luc Chessel, Les Inrockuptibles, April 2016.

Close up (1991, 102’) by Abbas Kiarostami, presented by Mamad Haghighat