The 1990 film Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami will be playing this coming Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

The film will play as a part of The Wind Will Carry Us: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami, and a co-presentation with the Aga Khan Museum. The retrospective is programmed by James Quandt.

Here is five reasons to check out Close-Up on Tuesday, March 1st.

1. The film serves as a fitting introduction to Abbas Kiarostami, as the film is extremely self-reflective, serving as a hybrid narrative / documentary. At its heart, it’s a film about a man who attempted to impersonate a director. Then Kiarostami went on to actually recreate the story with the impersonator and the director, and yet all the while recreating real events himself through the making of his own film. It’s layers upon layers upon layers.

2. The film was voted onto Sight & Sound’s list of the top 50 greatest films of all time, placing despite a clean and unedited version not being available in North America for quite a long time. The film demands to seen on a big screen, and the ending is extremely captivating.

3. The film will be introduced by professor Kaveh Askari, an expert of Third Cinema. Askari will certainly be able to provide insight into the masterwork.

4. The filmmaker Jafar Panahi, the writer and director of  last year’s masterful Taxi finds great influence from the films of Abbas Kiarostami. The line of influence into Panahi’s hybrid films (coupled with an examination of Iran’s political influence) are deeply felt, and Close-Up has gone on to serve as a watermark for many well-known directors, non-Iranian as well.

5. Abbas Kiarostami has seen much recognition in the city as of late, including a retrospective currently ongoing at the Aga Khan Museum, (Doors Without Keys), as well as an In Conversation With… at TIFF in November. Kiarostami has even left Iran and gone on to make films in English and Japanese. But this film is the starting point of an understanding of Kiarostami’s masterwork.