56 Films for 56 Years

Given the current recommendation to stay home and practice social distancing, we at the Chicago International Film Festival are looking at past selections from each year of the Festival that you can stream now from home. Stream our past selections as we look forward to the 56th Chicago International Film Festival this October 14-25, 2020.

Today’s #56Films entry, master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s mid-career highlight Close-Up, comes recommended by Chicago International Film Festival Programmer Sam Flancher.

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CLOSE-UP

Director: Abbas Kiarostami
1990, 26th Chicago International Film Festival

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. With its universal themes and fascinating narrative knots,Close-up has resonated with viewers around the world. (Criterion Channel)

Streaming Details:
Close-Up is streaming now on The Criterion Channel.