Close-Up

Name: Close-Up
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Genre: Crime, Drama
Released: 1990
Duration: 1 h 38 min
Rating: 7.951

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

1990·Directed by Abbas Kiarostami·4.3·1h 38m

Letterboxd Trailer Where to Watch

Crime Drama Iran

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.

Recommended by 5 People

“Close-up is an utter masterpiece, and I didn't feel the need to even bother writing about it. Like God.”

Josh Safdie

Director, Writer

“It's like the most incredible use of real people reenacting something that really happened to them you can't believe that what you're watching is not real that it's a reenactment.”

Michael Cera

Actor

“One of the most beautiful sentences is when the guy says 'because I was alone' - that made me cry and this film is really really fantastic.”

Bertrand Bonello

Director

“The mixing of fiction and documentary was so powerful. As Saifi said, there was no boundary between them. As Africans, we don't have limits between fiction and documentary. It freed me to just say to myself, 'I don't have to choose between documentary and fiction. I just want to tell the story as I really felt it.'”