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(Nema-ye Nazdik, Abbas Kiarostami, Iran 1990, 98 min., 35mm, Persian w/subtitles)

Remembering Kiarostami. Jean-Luc Godard once famously said, “Cinema begins with D. W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.” To commemorate the recent passing of this unique master of contemporary cinema, we are bringing back his most celebrated and beloved achievement, ranked among the fifty best films ever made according to the latest iteration of BFI’s influential survey. 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.