Close-up
Close-up • 1h 37m
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1990 • Iran
Starring Hossein Sabzian, Abolfazi Ahankhah, Mahrokh Ahankhah
Internationally revered Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has created some of the most inventive and transcendent cinema of the past thirty years, and CLOSE-UP is his most radical, brilliant work. This fiction-documentary hybrid uses a sensational real-life event—the arrest of a young man on charges that he fraudulently impersonated the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf—as the basis for a stunning, multilayered investigation into movies, identity, artistic creation, and existence, in which the real people from the case play themselves. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, CLOSE-UP has resonated with viewers around the world.
Up Next in Close-up
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CLOSE-UP Commentary
Recorded in 2009, this commentary features Iranian filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, coauthors of the book “Abbas Kiarostami.”
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The Traveler
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami • 1974 • Iran
Starring Hassan Darabi, Pare Gol AtashjamehAbbas Kiarostami’s first feature focuses on a boy in a provincial city so avid to get to Tehran to see a soccer match that he’ll lie to adults and cheat other kids. A quest film that’s also a study of youthful...
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“Close-Up” Long Shot
Five years after CLOSE-UP, Mahmoud Chokrollahi made this intimate portrait of the film’s principal figure, Hossein Sabzian, which consists of conversations and interviews with Sabzian and people who know him. “CLOSE-UP” LONG SHOT is a remarkable account of the effect Abbas Kiarostami’s film had o...
