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. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots, the film has resonated with viewers around the world.
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.
Reviews
"Sabzian clings to Makhmalbaf’s back as they ride toward the Ahankhah home on the director’s motorbike. Their conversation cuts in and out. It doesn’t matter, though, for the intimacy of their closeness is so authentic and real it almost hurts." – Slant
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