This fiction-documentary hybrid 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 stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves.

Hossain Sabzian and some of his associates discuss his character, his life-long obsession with cinema and his attitude towards the film he starred in, "Close-Up" (1990).