Close-Up

In the non-fiction narrative feature Close-Up (1989), Sabzian, an illiterate film buff who passed himself off as the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf plays himself in reconstructions of his fraud… His trial is genuine documentary footage, and then Kiarostami films him meeting the real Mahkmalbaf for the first time, an encounter that may be real and scripted at the same time.

Although Kiarostami’s realism is not overtly political and certainly not polemical, the culture clash between educated, relatively wealthy Tehranians and the country’s impoverished majority is an abiding interest. During Sabzian’s trial (shot in verite style) he claims his fraud was not malicious, that he was in some sense delusional. All the principal characters ’play’ themselves in this fascinating self-reflexive master work.

Ranked at #17 in the Sight & Sound critics’ poll, Close-Up was voted = 9th in the directors’ poll.

Sunday’s screening in our PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by an expert in the field.

Nov 19: Introduced by Dr. Hessam Dehghani, assistant professor of teaching Persian language and Culture at the University of British Columbia.

The film is driven both by deep, unsentimental compassion and by genuine philosophical curiosity; it explores the fraught relationships between truth and falsehood, film and ’reality’, intention and action, and acknowledges, from start to finish, the role and responsibility of the director in his engagement with the people in his film.

Geoff Andrew, Sight & Sound

The greatest documentary about filmmaking I have ever seen.

Werner Herzog

About this month’s guest speaker:

Dr. Hessam Dehghani earned his first PhD in Linguistics from Allameh Tabātabāi University, on the “Structural Analysis and Phenomenological Study of Persian Literature,” in 2012. He then earned another PhD in Philosophy from Boston College in 2019. Between August 2019 and December 2020, he was a post-doctoral fellow and associate researcher at Harvard Divinity School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, where he focused his research on the formation of Persianate identity in Persian mystic literature. He has presented on different aspects of Persian mystic literature regularly at Harvard University and Boston College.

Besides his research interests, he has been teaching English as a foreign language in Iran since 2000, and Persian and Arabic in North America for the past 8 years. Since 2012, he has taught Persian and Arabic and has directed the Persian program single-handedly at Boston College for which he received a teaching award and was nominated for a leadership award from that institution. In 2021, Dr. Dehghani started his tenure-track position as an assistant professor of teaching Persian language and Culture at the University of British Columbia.

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