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.

As I began to realize that I wasn’t alone, and that I wasn’t disgusting for wanting what I wanted, I chanced to tell someone how I felt. She responded positively, and we set a date when I could show her what I then regarded as my “female side”. That was the first time anyone saw me as the woman that I am.

My need to be seen as a different gender from what I was assigned at birth made me trans, but everyone feels this way about something

Every transperson who manages to leave the closet has a moment like this, and it’s a revelation. I knew I was getting something incredible, and tasting this freedom was transformative. It felt right in a way that nothing had ever been right before, and I wanted to always have this freedom. When it came time to take off my clothes and let go of what had happened, I was left empty in a particularly painful way. I felt so bereft, aware that I had opened the door to something enormous, but lacking any assurance that I would ever get to go there again. Amid these feelings of loss, doubt, and emptiness, Kiarostami was my consolation.

Close-Up is the real-life story of a laborer named Sabzian who manages to trick a family into believing that he’s the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. For a time, Sabzian’s life takes on a new value as he swells with the satisfaction of this new identity. But then one day he’s found out, and everything comes crashing back down to earth. Kiarostami finds him in jail for the transgression, films his trial, and uses Sabzian, Makhmalbaf, and the family as actors who re-enact their own story.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Close-Up spoke to me as the story of someone who felt the transformative power of getting to be a different person.’ Photograph: handout/Handout

On a very literal level, Close-Up spoke to me as the story of someone who felt the transformative power of getting to be a different person, but on a deeper level it spoke to me about the compact we make with the world over our identity. Although Sabazian could easily call himself Makhmalbaf while he was all by himself, it meant very little compared with when others saw him as a director. I could relate to this because for years I had dressed up in women’s clothing when I was all alone, and I always knew that it wouldn’t be satisfying until I had others to validate my identity.

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I craved the authenticity that comes from having your identity reflected back at you. Kiarostami helped me to understand that this was something that all people need. My need to be seen as a different gender from what I was assigned at birth made me trans, but everyone feels this way about something. For Sabzian, this validation helped him to believe in a part of himself that he doubted. He didn’t really want to be Makhmalbaf, he just wanted to be someone who could command respect, who could tell stories with images, who could make others feel excited.

It’s a natural thing to take on these role models as we feel our way toward our true selves. When I saw Juliette Binoche in Kiarostami’s 2010 film, Certified Copy, I felt an intense desire to be like her, to be a woman who possessed her elegance, her easy sensuality, her feminine strength. I felt a deep identification with the way she moved about the screen in a simple yet stylish dress, at once anxious, seductive, vulnerable, and powerful. I knew right then that this was what I wanted from womanhood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Veronica Esposito

Certified Copy also educated me in the fluidity of our identities. The movie is almost shot in real-time, occurring over just one day in Italy and showing two strangers transforming into a husband and wife of 15 years. Kiarostami leaves it vague whether they were always married and just pretending to go on a first date –perhaps to inject some romance into their relationship – or they really are strangers who have chosen to momentarily become the spouse that each other needs. As I watched their transformation, I understood how I could become a woman for a few hours at a time, even though my life seemed so dominated by my maleness. It also helped me to see how much was hiding inside of me, and that I might one day release it into the world.

Of the many things I’ve learned about being trans by watching Kiarostami, the most important thing I discovered was that when I chose to become a woman, I wasn’t just becoming a copy but rather an original. Kiarostami’s films travel across the thin line that separates laborer from director, lover from stranger, real from fake. They reveal the authenticity that is latent within us, showing that these hidden selves can often be more valid than the face we show to the world. Kiarostami teaches that we can come alive in unprecedented ways, given the right situation.

Nowadays, when the world unequivocally regards me as a woman, and when I feel perfectly confident to embrace and embody the female I truly am, it’s hard to remember just how difficult it once was to believe even a tiny bit in these things. I know that for whole decades of my life it seemed suffocatingly shameful to think this way, and I had to work so hard to make even a tiny space outside of the beliefs imposed on me. Kiarostami’s films helped me find the courage to break out of this prison of the mind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abbas Kiarostami in 2007. Photograph: Eric Estrade/AFP/Getty Images

For Kiarostami, the truth is elusive. Far from the clear and discrete quantity that we’re told it is, it’s actually something that’s hidden beneath layers of obscurations, something that we tend to only find with the use of artifice and imagination. His films are journeys into this terrain where the truth may exist fleetingly. They are also about the grace and absolution that can come once we are able to grab hold of this truth, however briefly.

Close-Up ends with the family that Sabzian has wronged forgiving him, and with Sabzian mounting a motorcycle behind the real-life Makhmalbaf to bring them a gift. Because Sabzian has found a piece of his truth, he is able to enter a new phase of his life in which he can make good on past wrongs.

If Kiarostami still has anything left to give me in my journey, I feel that it has to do with this, my past. One of the most difficult things about being transgender is that once you have freed yourself and become your correct gender, you still must contend with all of the years in which you lived a lie and hid from your true self. This is work that I am undertaking now, work of reconciliation and forgiveness. Kiarostami’s films show that this forgiveness can happen only once we’ve found the strength to see ourselves for who we really are, and fully let go of the past identities that wronged us.