Five years after Kiarostami's Close-Up, CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT focuses on Hossein Sabzian telling his own story. Far from being an impostor, he communicates his infatuation with the movies and his conception of the 7th Art. He tells how his life changed after shooting the film. He reflects upon his social condition, his desires, his fears, becoming like a mirror in which ordinary people and moviegoers can see their own face.

CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT is a series of conversations and interviews with people who know Sabzian. It is constructed like ,a pyramid of mounting emotion'. Voices criss-cross. Isolation. Then, a long sequence shot of Sabzian himself. Close shots that capture the emotions... Confinement.

"I was so moved by CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT that I couldn't sleep all night. Sabzian talks about the movies like a great philosopher. He touches on several episodes in his life, but what most affected me was when he speaks of his father and when he hides in the cinema toilets..." Bologna, 11th September 1996

"CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT is a tribute to all the world's filmgoers and it should make us think about the film maker's responsibility if even a single solitary spectator were to be Sabzian." Rome, 25th November 1996

"If I keep on dreaming," says Sabzian in CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT, "it is because my dreams have never come true."

It's a hard awakening, when a dream turns into a nightmare. In Close-up, Kiarostami's masterpiece, dreams become reality. Sabzian's experience is quite painful... Yet why should it stop us from dreaming? That was the question I had in mind when I started shooting this film.

Hossein Sabzian: My father took my hand and placed it in the hand of cinema. Then my father let go of my hand, but Cinema never let go of me. So I shook the hand and greeted it saying: "Salaam Cinema" for the first time.

Once my mother gave me some money to go and buy some gasoline. I hid the jerrycan in the bathroom and ran off to the cinema to see The Gates of Hell. I was completely absorbed by the film during the first showing, but then I began to visualize another film, in which my father was giving me a dreadful beating. The terror instilled in me by that vision glued me to the seat. I stayed until the last show. When the spectators were leaving, I went and hid in the toilets. Then I came back into the cinema and went to sleep on the seat."

CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT is a close-up of the character called Hossein in Kiarostami's Close-up. In that film he was reliving his own real-life as an imposter passing himself off as the film director Makhmalbaf... An incurable movie-fan, convinced that screen reality is true reality, conman Hossein tells us in this new version how his imposture was sincere, how it won him short-lived fame, a great deal of trouble, and much sympathy. All the while, he proclaims his faith in cinema with the lucidity and sensitivity of a great critic. Alberto Farassino, in: La republica, 17th November 1996

Mahmoud Chokrollahi was born in Qom, Iran in 1958. He now lives in Paris where he majored in Social Anthropology and Comparative Sociology at the Sorbonne. A writer and film critic for many magazines in his country, he has published ,L'heure bleue', a collection of tales in French (Ed. L'Harmattan).

Mahomoud Chokrollahi started making films in 1987. In 1995, he founded the film production and distribution company in Paris, Play Film.

Co-writer and co-director Moslem Monsouri was born in Teheran in 1963. He studies sociology in Paris and has been working as a journalist since 1993. CLOSE-UP LONG SHOT is his first film.