I’m a trans woman. Kiarostami’s films helped me escape a prison of the mind
Films like Close-Up and Certified Copy travel across a thin line of identity separating laborer from director, lover from stranger
The first thing I did after I was a woman for the very first time was to watch a movie by Abbas Kiarostami. The movie was Close-Up, and it spoke in so many ways to exactly what I was trying to understand about myself that night. It felt like fate, or divine intervention, that I got to watch that movie at that exact moment.
I was assigned male at birth, and all throughout my life I had felt intense desires to be female. I didn’t always recognize them as such, because I was into my 30s before I really knew what transgender was or that “normal” people could change gender. For most of my life, I just thought I felt a perverted desire to wear women’s clothes, so I hid it from everyone and tried to force myself to stop wanting to be a woman.