Abbas Kiarostami

Close-up

Close-up

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.

Film Info

  • Iran
  • 1990
  • 98 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • Persian
  • Spine #519

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, authors of Abbas Kiarostami
  • The Traveler, director Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature
  • “Close-up” Long Shot, a documentary on Close-up’s central figure, Hossein Sabzian, six years after the film
  • New video interview with Kiarostami
  • A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), a documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire

    New cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Special Features

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, authors of Abbas Kiarostami
  • The Traveler, director Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature
  • “Close-up” Long Shot, a documentary on Close-up’s central figure, Hossein Sabzian, six years after the film
  • New video interview with Kiarostami
  • A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), a documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A new essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire

    New cover by Eric Skillman
Close-up
Cast
Hossein Sabzian
Abolfazi Ahankhah
Mahrokh Ahankhah
Mehrdad Ahankhah
Houshang Shamai
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Hassan Farazmand
Credits
Director
Abbas Kiarostami
Screenplay
Abbas Kiarostami
Photography
Ali-Reza Zarrindast
Editing
Abbas Kiarostami
Music (theme from The Traveler)
Kambiz Roushanavan

Current

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This milestone of Iranian filmmaking fuses, in a wholly original way, an unorthodox mix of documentary and fiction, a self-reflexive musing on cinema and its impact, and a simultaneous exaltation and questioning of the auteur.

By Godfrey Cheshire

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