#519: KIAROSTAMI, Abbas: Close-up (1990)

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KIAROSTAMI, Abbas (Iran)
Close-up [1990]
Spine #519
Blu-ray


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 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.

98 minutes
Color
Monaural
in Persian
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2010
Director/Writer


Abbas Kiarostami was 50 when he wrote and directed Close-up.

Other Kiarostami films in the Collection:

#992: Through The Olive Trees (1994)

The Film

Film Rating (0-60):

60

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixteen-page booklet featuring an essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire.

Commentary

By Mehmaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, authors of Abbas Kiarostami.

The Traveler

Director Kiarostami’s first feature.
“Close-up” Long Shot

A documentary on Close-up’s central figure, Hossein Sabzian, six years after the film.
Video interview

With Kiarostami.
A Walk with Kiarostami

A documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami.
Extras Rating (0-40):

39

60 + 39 =

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