I was looking through the filmography of Abbas Kiarostami and my eyes focused on the film “Close-up” / Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990, which on closer examination turned out to be very unusual, especially for that time, a film shot in the genre of documentary, or pseudo-documentary, it is both documentary and feature films. At one time, after
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I was looking through the filmography of Abbas Kiarostami and my eyes focused on the film “Close-up” / Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990, which on closer examination turned out to be very unusual, especially for that time, a film shot in the genre of documentary, or pseudo-documentary, it is both documentary and feature films. At one time, after hearing about the event that formed the basis of the film, after reading an article by journalist Hossein Farazmand in 1989, Kiarostami got the idea to make a film about it, which he eventually did, and he acted very quickly, he visited the defendant in prison, he was allowed to film the court, and the characters agreed to portray retrospective footage. And the story was really very remarkable - a certain movie lover Hossein Sabzian, who was fond of the work of film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and really somewhat similar to him, impersonates him, rubs himself into the trust of a decent middle-income family and develops activities allegedly preceding the shooting of a new film he conceived. For some time he succeeds, but in the end, family members suspected something was wrong, invited a friend of the journalist Hossein Farazmand, who came with the police, exposed the impostor, he was immediately arrested and taken to the station. After some time, the trial took place, Sabzian was accused of fraud and attempted fraud, he also explained his act by love for the director's films and for the cinema, there the situation was discussed and the judge offered the plaintiffs to forgive the defendant, which they did on the condition that he would take the right path. At the end of the film, the impostor meets the real director, whom he pretended to be. The most interesting trick in this film is that literally all the characters, up to the police officers who made the arrest, are played by real characters, i.e. everyone plays themselves, I must say that they coped well with this. I read that after the film, Sabzian’s life radically changed, which is not surprising, I do not know the details, a few years later another documentary about Sabzian was shot, where he told about it. However, at the age of 52, he died on the subway from an asthma attack. Despite such a not very complicated plot, I watched the film really with interest, I liked it.
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