Close-Up

Close-Up (1990)

کلوزآپ ، نمای نزدیک

A real-life situation based on a real incident in actual locations with actual people involved.

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.

Date of release
1990-05-09
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (472)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Abbas Kiarostami

Casting

Interesting facts

Close-Up is a 1990 Iranian docufiction written, directed and edited by Abbas Kiarostami. The film tells the story of Hossein Sabzian, a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf and conned a family into believing they would star in his new film. The director received permission to film the historic trial; with their agreement, he featured the people involved in re-enacting certain events that had preceded that. All "play" themselves. Through this work about human identity, Kiarostami gained wider international recognition.

Production

Close-Up is based on actual events that occurred in Northern Tehran in the late 1980s. Kiarostami first heard about Sabzian in 1989 after reading about the incident in an article in the Iranian magazine Sorush by journalist Hassan Farazmand. Kiarostami immediately suspended work on the film project for which he was in pre-production.

Taken by the figure of the impostor, he began making a documentary on Sabzian. Kiarostami was allowed to film Sabzian's trial. He gained the agreement of Sabzian, the Ahankhahs, and journalist Farazmand to participate in the film and to re-enact past incidents. Kiarostami also arranged for director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to meet Sabzian and help facilitate the Ahankhah family's pardon for Sabzian.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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