Welcome to Close-Up!
Close-Up makes film culture and history accessible through its film programmes and mediatheque.
Located in the heart of Shoreditch, Close-Up is the ideal venue for all your screening needs, whether you wish to host a press screening, corporate event, presentation, conference, Christmas or birthday party. Our adjoined cafe and bar is fully licensed and offers a convivial atmosphere for drinks receptions, networking or informal post-screening discussion.
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Showing This Week
Friday 28 June: Yi Yi
Edward Yang's extraordinary Yi Yi follows a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. Warm, sprawling, and dazzling, this intimate epic is one of the undisputed masterworks of the new century.
Saturday 29 June: Three Times
"“If anything sums up both the Taiwanese Experience and Hou’s films, it is sudden, unexpected, and often irreversible changes,” writes film scholar James Udden, a characterisation that might have provided the structural basis for Three Times, Hou’s tripartite narrative of missed connections across the ages. Chen Chang and Qi Shu play fated lovers weaving through a compendium of milieus familiar to Hou.
Saturday 29 June: Taipei Story
Edward Yang’s second feature is a mournful anatomy of a city caught between the past and the present. Taipei Story chronicles the growing estrangement between a washed-up baseball player (Hou Hsiao-hsien) working in his family’s textile business and his girlfriend (pop star Tsai Chin), who clings to the upward mobility of her career in property development.
Sunday 30 June: Rebels of the Neon God
A haunting portrait of loneliness and misdirected youth, Rebels of the Neon God revealed Tsai Ming-liang’s ability to discover the expressive potential of overlooked everyday spaces – back alleys, motels, video arcades. The emergence of Tsai’s minimal aesthetic is apparent at key moments throughout the film.
Sunday 30 June: Stray Dogs
In the last feature film from Tsai Ming-liang, a single father (Lee Kang-sheng) makes his meager living holding up an advertising placard on a traffic island in the middle of a busy highway. Stray Dogs is many things at once: minimal in its narrative content and syntax, as visually powerful as it is emotionally overwhelming, and bracingly pure in both its anger and its compassion. One of the finest works of an extraordinary artist.
Showing Next Week
Monday 1 July: Close-Up Cinema Year 4
Marking the fourth anniversary of our cinema we're pleased to once again present Abbas Kiarostami’s fiction-documentary hybrid Close-Up alongside Nanni Moretti’s short Opening Day of Close-Up.
Tuesday 2 July: Dust in the Wind
A beloved favorite among Hou’s early films, Dust in the Wind is an affecting and poignantly fatalistic story of first love which follows a young couple finishing high school and leaving their remote mining village in search of work and a new life in Taipei. The film’s hypnotic extended opening shot makes clear the careful formal lyricism which marks the film as an important milestone in Hou’s oeuvre.
Wednesday 3 July: A City of Sadness
Hou Hsio-Hsien’s epic film focuses on the complex history of 20th-century Taiwan during the turbulent period in Taiwanese history between the fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the establishment of martial law in 1949. Made in the wake of the lifting of martial law on the island, A City of Sadness is both an important act of remembrance and a landmark of world cinema.
Thursday 4 July: Three Times
"“If anything sums up both the Taiwanese Experience and Hou’s films, it is sudden, unexpected, and often irreversible changes,” writes film scholar James Udden, a characterisation that might have provided the structural basis for Three Times, Hou’s tripartite narrative of missed connections across the ages. Chen Chang and Qi Shu play fated lovers weaving through a compendium of milieus familiar to Hou.
Friday 5 July: That Day on the Beach
Edward Yang’s first theatrical feature film is an intriguing blend of melodrama and social critique that occasionally recalls Fassbinder’s cool theatricality. The contrasting stories told by two reunited friends crystallize different facets of a changing Taiwan. The film also marks the debut of celebrated and influential cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
Saturday 6 July: A Brighter Summer Day
Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked Taiwan in the 1960s. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centres on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager from innocence to juvenile delinquency.
Coming Soon
14 July 2019: Joji Koyama & Tujiko Noriko: Kuro
We're thrilled to welcome Joji Koyama and Tujiko Noriko to present their new film Kuro. This screening will be preceded by a special matinee performance by Tujiko Noriko at Café Oto.
Calendar
Fri 28 Jun 7:30pm
Yi Yi
Yi Yi
Sat 29 Jun 5:30pm
Three Times
Three Times
Sat 29 Jun 8:30pm
Taipei Story
Taipei Story
Sun 30 Jun 5:30pm
Rebels of the Neon God
Rebels of the Neon God
Sun 30 Jun 8:00pm
Stray Dogs
Stray Dogs
Mon 01 Jul 8:15pm
Close-Up Cinema Year 4
Close-Up Cinema Year 4
Tue 02 Jul 8:15pm
Dust in the Wind
Dust in the Wind
Wed 03 Jul 8:15pm
A City of Sadness
A City of Sadness
Thu 04 Jul 8:30pm
Three Times
Three Times
Fri 05 Jul 7:30pm
That Day on the Beach
That Day on the Beach
Sat 06 Jul 6:00pm
A Brighter Summer Day
A Brighter Summer Day
Sun 07 Jul 8:30pm
Vive l'Amour
Vive l'Amour
Tue 09 Jul 8:15pm
The River
The River
Sun 14 Jul 8:30pm
Joji Koyama & Tujiko Noriko: Kuro
Joji Koyama & Tujiko Noriko: Kuro
