Close-Up

Aroview: A uniquely-devised work intermingling life and art, documentary and fiction, born of a real life incident in which an unemployed film buff is tried for “attempted fraud” by posing as film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Around actual footage of the trial itself, dir. Kiarostami deftly (re)constructs a narrative utilizing the participants themselves as characters, which ironically casts the humble accused as the leading man of a major feature film – itself a multi-layered, humanistic meditation on the power of cinema.

Tape contains Nanni Moretti’s short “The Day of the Premiere of Close-Up” (7m.) in which the Italian director plays a neurotic cinema owner.

NZ International Film Festival 1991

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