The second section of the retrospective features films that marked the beginning of Kiarostami’s exploration of the nature of film and the moving image and their connection with the physical reality.
From the late 1970s to the late 1980s, Kiarostami worked a lot as a documentary maker, appearing before the camera and inserting into his narrative the device and the theme of “a film about the film,” central in his work. Thus subverting the suspension of disbelief, conventional even in documentaries, he activated the viewer’s participation and brought to their attention the space between the screen and the audience. In the documentaries of the time, he seemed to have gathered visual material for his later features, in which the line between the document and invention, the real and the imaginary, the original and the copy became blurry and uncertain.
The section includes one of Kiarostami’s most conceptual films, Close-up that merged documentation, fiction, and reconstruction to the point of indistinction, as well as the first film in Kiarostami's Koker trilogy Where Is the Friend's Home?, which grew out of his documentary Homework and became his first international success.