The Walker pays tribute to Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) with a special screening of the Iranian director’s 1990 masterwork Close-up. The Iranian masterpiece is a rich, multilayered documentary drama about Hossein Sabzian’s real-life impersonation of the famous director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and lying his way into the life of a Teheran family. Once unmasked, Sabzian went to court for fraud. Hearing this news, Kiarostami was quick to assemble a crew to reconstruct the facts and to film the trial.
Close-up interrogates notions of appearance and reality, truth and falsehood, fiction and documentary. Kiarostami reflected on the perplexities of justice, social inequity, and personal identity that touch on the world’s imagination, creating an iconic film and milestone in the history of cinema. “The greatest documentary on filmmaking I have ever seen” (Werner Herzog). 1990, color, digital, in Persian and Azerbaijani with English subtitles, 98 minutes.
Close-up is part of the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
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