It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast, devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here with Genevieve Koski. And Scott Tobias. Tasha Robinson is away this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, unless that story is all some sort of elaborate con. Here on the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context. So, every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we'll be playing ourselves in a lyrical blurring of fact and fiction that only seems like an episode of The Next Picture Show. Genevieve, what's ahead for us? What's ahead for us? Or what's ahead for our lightly fictionalized counterparts? Or is the distinction even worth making? That's one of the questions at the heart of both movies we'll be looking at this week, with our pairing of Abbas Kyrostami's 1990 Classic Closeup and Chloe Zhao's The Writer, a new release that lives in the space between the real world and the fictional world that Kirostami helped carve out. Both feature real people playing themselves in some version of a story that really happened to them, and both blend approaches associated with documentary and narrative features to find a third approach that draws on the strengths of both while committing to neither. In this week's episode, we'll look at close-up and discuss how it blends a real-life incident with a recreation of the same where it fits into kerosami's career and in the history of iranian cinema

what it says about the relationship between those who create art and those who appreciate it

and its lasty influence on other filmmakers and remember if you hear the sound cutting out at key

moments in this podcast that could be an audio glitch or it could be a reminder that no form of art can depict reality without the story yet in some way, or both.

On the surface, close up is one of the simplest films we've ever covered on this show, but that

fails to take an account just how slippery that surface is. It's an unflashy depiction of a minor crime

and its ensuing trial, shot almost entirely in long takes, including some extensive stretches

of minimally edited trial footage. It begins and ends with a group of men visiting a house,

and its climax involves a leisurely moped ride through the streets of Tehran ends with a group of men visiting a house, and its climax involves

a leisurely moped ride through the streets of Tehran, with a stop to buy some flowers. It's a humble

effort, at least compared to the scale at which most movies operate, but it's also a film fully

alive to every possibility its scenario allows it to explore, becoming nothing less than an inquiry

into the nature of identity, the meaning of forgiveness,

arts obligation to the truth, and reality itself. The film tells the strange true story of Hossein Sabsian, an Iranian man who claims to be the famous film director Mosin Makhpabov,

when he meets the matrix of the upper-man-class Ahanka family on a city bus. He then proceeds to exploit

the confusion, cultivating a relationship with the Ahanka family, with a bus. He then proceeds to exploit the confusion, cultivating a relationship

with the Ahanka family with a suggestion that they and their home might play important roles in his

next film, and borrowing a little money in the process. It doesn't take that long for Mr. Ohanka

to suspect something is a miss, leading him to bring in both the police and a journalist,

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