Pulp Time title

Close Up

An unemployed cinephile tells a Tehran family he is the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf — and for a while they believe they will be in his next film. Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 masterpiece restages the real fraud with the real people, then walks into the actual courtroom and keeps the camera running. Hossein Sabzian, the Ahankhahs, even Makhmalbaf himself play themselves; documentary and fiction share the same faces. The result is one of the essential films about cinema, class, and the hunger to be seen: not a stunt but a new grammar. Close-Up announced post-revolutionary Iranian film to the world, sits high in Sight & Sound’s greatest-films polls, and remains Kiarostami’s most perfect fusion of ethics and form. After it, movies could no longer pretend the camera was invisible.