Close-Up

In 1989, an unemployed printer named Hossein Sabzian walked into a Tehran household and introduced himself as Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the celebrated Iranian director. He told the family he wanted to film their lives. They believed him. When the deception was discovered, Sabzian was arrested for fraud. Abbas Kiarostami read about the case in a magazine and got permission to film the trial.

The result is Close-Up, a film that defies every category. It is partly a documentary (the trial is real, the participants are themselves), partly a fiction (Kiarostami asked Sabzian and the family to re-enact certain scenes), and partly a philosophical inquiry into why anyone — an unemployed man, a middle-class family, any of us — wants to be someone else.

Sabzian's testimony is heartbreaking: "I am not a fraud. I am interested in cinema. Cinema is my only love." In one of the film's final scenes, Kiarostami stages an encounter between Sabzian and the real Makhmalbaf. The two men ride a motorcycle through Tehran. It is unclear who is comforting whom.

Close-Up regularly appears on critics' lists of the greatest films of all time. It is the rare film that changes your understanding of what cinema can be.