Regarded as one of the 20 best films of all time in the most recent BFI poll, Close-up is an unusual mix of drama and documentary, and one that gained a great deal more international recognition for Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. As well as raising some very particular questions about the ethics of deception, the film also raises some broader questions about the possibility of communicating thoughts and emotions, as well as questions about identity. 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.

Philosophy at the Showroom is a series of screenings that probe the philosophical questions raised by some of cinema’s most intriguing films. Each film will be introduced by a philosopher from the University of Sheffield and will be followed by a group discussion of the philosophical problems it confronts.

Director Abbas Kiarostami
Year 1998
Duration 1h 58m
Language Persian with English Subtitles
Cast Hossain Sabzian, Mohsen Makmalbaf