Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who died in July 2016, has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and Close-Up (1990) is arguably his most daring, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary 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 multilayered investigation into cinema, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, Close-Up has resonated with viewers around the world. By creating this new space in film, in which the real and the constructed can play and interact freely, Kiarostami positions himself as a true master of cinema.