Opening Day of Close-Up
Nanni Moretti, 1996, 7 min
Italian with English subtitles

“At his cinema in Rome, the Nuovo Sacher, Nanni Moretti anxiously oversees preparations for the premiere of the film Close-Up, by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Meanwhile, Disney’s The Lion King is taking Italy by storm.” – Harvard Film Archive

Close-Up
Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, 98 min
Persian with English subtitles
Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

“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.” – Janus Films

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Part of our Essential Cinema series