Film Forum
209 W Houston St
212.727.8110
This event has passed.
-
Close-Up
- When
-
Mar 26, 2010 – Apr 1, 2010
Daily
- Where
-
- Price
-
$12
“Forget Iran: Abbas Kiarostami is simply one of the world's superlative auteurs. And Close-Up, which the Tehran-born filmmaker made in between his famed Koker Trilogy, is arguably his greatest achievement. It's an ingenious plait of fact and fiction, a heartfelt exploration of the limits of film while parsing out the cinephile Sabzian's real-life trespass.”
Jason Jude Chan, Flavorpill
Film Forum says:
A reporter frantically going door to door to bum a tape recorder for his Big Story; a middle-class Teheran family falling for semi-employed movie nut Hossein Sabzian’s spur-of-the-moment impersonation of acclaimed film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar) on a crowded bus; a fraud trial over a phony movie project, the arrest seen twice from different perspectives, including the bleakly staring arrestee’s; and the real Makhmalbaf appearing in person via motorcycle at the jailhouse door — what’s real and what isn’t in the first of Abbas Kiarostami’s Chinese box blurrings of documentary and ...? Kiarostami filmed the real-life trial, the good-sport major participants — including the suckered family and painfully sincere, passionately movie-crazed Sabzian — played themselves in reenactments; with the climax pure vérité, complete with in-and-out sound recording thanks to a balky mike. Cannes Palme d’Or winner for Taste of Cherry, Kiarostami’s oeuvre has been compared at various times to Satyajit Ray, Jacques Tati, and Vittorio De Sica — but is ultimately uniquely his own; this was in a way his ode to cinema. “Kiarostami’s films are extraordinary. Words can’t relate my feelings. See his movies and then you’ll see what I mean.” – Akira Kurosawa.
