Close-Up

Director: Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami

1990 / 98min / 35mm

A bizarre-yet-true news event that occurred in Tehran in the ’80s, in which an unemployed young man, Hossein Sabzian, impersonated famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and conned his way into a middle-class family’s home by convincing them they would be the stars of his next vérité-style film, inspired this fascinating and intensely moving documentary-fiction from the great Iranian director Kiarostami, a meditation on art and identity like no other that’s one of a handful of true modernist milestones in the history of cinema. “A bold thesis for a cinema that is not merely populist but thoroughly and originally democratic… [Close-Up’s] confusion of aesthetic forms doubles the confusion of social hierarchies, of law and morality, truth and deceit, and art and life.”—Artforum