Abbas Kiarostami: Vérités et songes

"Jean-Pierre Limosin starts out with Abbas Kiarostami on a search that resembles the one in one of his auteur's most famous films, a search that will take him right across Iran on the tracks of the characters in E la vita continua. By choosing to adopt a structure identical with that of Kiarostami's film, Limosin stresses that fondness for the theme of the journey which the Iranian has placed at the centre of many of his films, as though the cinema were first and foremost an art of movement: movement around the world to stumble upon unhoped-for signs of the real, and movement of the world so as better to define the demarcation line between the true and the false, between truth and mask. This constant game of mystification, which was, for example, the narrative fulcrum of Close up, emerges forcefully in one of the closing scenes: while Limosin and Kiarostami are talking in a jeep about the fascination of the cinecamera, a man knocks on the window and starts gesticulating wildly at the camera because he wants to be in the shot. And at that very moment the viewer wonders whether to believe what s/he sees, because perhaps it's really a falsehood, a game, an illusion. In any case, manipulation is the tool par excellence that Kiarostami favours for his investigations of the constitution of the image, its relationship with reality and the social responsibility of the cinéaste, who is a creator of fiction and therefore of lies." (Stéphane Bouquet, Le cinéma de la cruauté, "Cahiers du cinéma", n° 486, December 1994)

Director: Jean-Pierre Limosin.
Screenplay: Ramin Jahanbegloo, J.-P. Limosin.
Intervista: Hengameh Panahi, J.-P. Limosin.
Director of photography: JeanMarc Fabre, J.-P. Limosin.
Music: Georges Delerue.
Sound: Changiz Sayad, Hassan Zahedi.
Editor: Gabrielle Marsal-Zubovic, Nadine Tarbouriech, Soudabh Abadi.
Mixaggio: Francisco Camino.
Production company: La Sept/ARTE, Amip, INA, con la partecipazione di CNC, Procirep, FAVI (Ministère des Affaires Etrangères).
Produttore delegato: Xavier Carniaux (Amip), Thierry Garrel (La Sept/ARTE - Unité de programme documentaires), Claude Guisard (INA - Direction des programmes de création).
Serie diretta da: Janine Bazin, André S. Labarthe.