Close-Up

6.30pm

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

Baltic Cinema

To launch its new cinema programme, Baltic presents two films about the power of cinema itself. The first is Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-up, is a dizzying, electrifying film about one man’s love for films and filmmaking which calls into question truth, authenticity — and who tells stories for and to whom.

Close-Up
Dir. Abbas Kiarostami Iran 1990 98’ (cert. U)
Farsi with English subtitles | 35mm transferred to digital video

Close-Up is rarely screened yet regularly sits near the top of the polls as one of the greatest films ever made. Come for this first screening and find out what else is coming up as part of Baltic Cinema.

‘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.’ — Janus Films

‘I was so moved by the film. It was a complete change, in terms of seeing the world again … an extraordinary film’ —Martin Scorsese

Level 1 Cinema
Doors open 18:30; Film starts 18:45. Baltic Kitchen is open until 18:30 for drinks, which you are welcome to take up to the cinema.

South Shore Road Gateshead NE8 3BA

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2 July 2025

6.30pm

£6 Full price / £4 Students, unwaged and 65+

Venue opening hours:

  • Wed 6.30

Accessibility

  • Accessible toilets
  • Adult changing facilities
  • Baby changing facilities
  • Hearing loop
  • Level access
  • Lifts to all areas
  • Mobility scooters
  • Walking aids

'Close-up' — trailer