An Abbas Kiarostami Retrospective Epilogue

A needy middle-aged Tehran citizen is so obsessed with cinema that he pretends to be the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. In this role, he gains the trust of a wealthy family and even promises to shoot its members in his new film. Based on real-life events and involving their participants, Close-Up is Kiarostami’s first universally acclaimed masterpiece. This is a multilayered film about everyday life and imagination, play and identity, in which Kiarostami imperceptibly yet forever erases the line between documentary and fiction, fact and reconstruction, actor and character.

The main protagonist, a filmmaker and Abbas Kiarostami’s alter ego, arrives with his young son in the Iranian village of Koker after a massive earthquake that claimed many lives. They get acquainted with the survivors and try to find the kids who starred in the movie Where Is the Friend’s House? The second part of the Koker Trilogy, Life, and Nothing More… is Kiarostami’s signature picture, whereby he turns his own traumatic and, at the same time, cathartic journey into a “documentary fiction.”

An Iranian director travels to a small earthquake-ravaged town to make a new film. To play newlyweds, who got married immediately after the tragedy despite losing loved ones, he chooses two nonprofessional actors from local residents, involved, unlike their characters, in a hugely complicated relationship. One of Kiarostami’s least linear works, Through the Olive Trees explores life and art after a catastrophe—and in a sense after death—through the prism of “cinema about cinema.”