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.

New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary by Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, authors of Abbas Kiarostami
The Traveler, director Abbas Kiarostami’s first feature
“Close-up” Long Shot, a documentary on Close-up’s central figure, Hossein Sabzian, six years after the film
New video interview with Kiarostami
A Walk with Kiarostami (2003), a documentary portrait of the director by Iranian film professor Jamsheed Akrami
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A new essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire

New cover by Eric Skillman