Close-Up

Close-Up dramatizes a real case from Iran in which a young man named Hossein Sabzian passed himself off as the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Presenting himself as a director preparing a new project, he gained the trust of a middle-class family and spent time in their home before they grew suspicious and had him arrested on fraud charges. The film follows the case through to the courtroom, where Sabzian answers for what he did. Rather than simply recreating events, Abbas Kiarostami blends documentary and fiction: the people involved in the affair appear as themselves, and the trial footage is interwoven with staged scenes of the encounters leading up to it, so that the film is as much about cinema, identity and the place movies hold in Iranian life as it is about the deception itself.

Kiarostami wrote as well as directed the film, which was produced by Hassan Aghakarimi through Kanoon and runs 98 minutes. It came roughly in the middle of his career to that point, following Homework in 1989 and preceding Life, and Nothing More… in 1992, the tenth of the twenty-one features credited to him. Alongside Sabzian, the cast consists largely of the Ahankhah family and others connected to the case, playing themselves.

Audiences have rated the film highly, with an 8 out of 10 average on TMDB from about 460 votes, and critics' assessments place it somewhat higher at 8.3 out of 10 across a small set of reviews.