Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-up is one of his most radical, formally inventive works. 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, multi-layered 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 proved hugely inventive to contemporary filmmakers.

Notes by David O’Mahony