Editorial reading
A fake director, a real courtroom: Kiarostami shows the truest testimony comes from the staged scene.
A film about a man who pretended to be a director, in which everyone involved ended up genuinely acting.
The reading
In Tehran, an impoverished film-lover named Sabzian tells a woman on a bus: I am the director Makhmalbaf. Two weeks later he is arrested for impersonation. Kiarostami obtains permission to film the trial, then has everyone involved — the judge, the journalists, the deceived Ahankhah family — re-enact themselves before the camera. The boundary between documentary and fiction dissolves in this film like Tehran fog.
What makes the film tender is that it sees clearly what Sabzian wanted. Not money — to be taken seriously. Borrowing a name is like borrowing a decent coat. And the most painful contrast lies here: inside the "fraud" he was treated more like a person than in his real life. The final scene, his meeting with the real Makhmalbaf, is one of cinema's rare encounters that seeks no verdict: two men climb onto a motorcycle and ride to a date long overdue.
Questions to sit with
Answer them yourself first, then open the reference answer.
Q1What was Sabzian after when he impersonated a director?
A reference answer
Not money — dignity. Borrowing the director's name is like borrowing a decent coat: in it he is respected, invited into homes, taken seriously. The film's cruelest gift is making you admit that inside the "fraud" he was treated more like a person than in his real life.
Q2Kiarostami films the trial, then has everyone re-enact it — which layer is he actually filming?
A reference answer
Both layers, because the real drifts between them. The trial is reality under institution; the re-enactment is reality under cinema; and when the victim's family genuinely weeps during the re-enactment, the border between the two collapses. It is one of cinema's rare works in which "making a film" itself becomes a human arena.
Q3Have you ever "played" a more respectable version of yourself? When does that role tire you most?
A reference answer
A hint: job interviews, first dates, parents' evenings — we are all borrowing names and coats. The test between healthy performance and self-betrayal is what happens after the coat comes off: do you feel relieved, or empty? Sabzian belongs to the second kind, which is why his story is so sad.