'Close Up' starring Isabelle Huppert sets production for Italy this summer

Isabelle Huppert to star in Close-Up which enters production this summer, our sister site Screen International has revealed. 

Production on prolific Italian director Tonino de Bernardi’s 28th film will take place in Liguria in Italy. Paris-based Loco Films is launching international sales at this year's European Film Market.

Huppert will play multiple roles of successive female characters through successive eras from the 17th century to contemporary times.

The roles include a 1948 peasant, an emigrant from the early 20th-century, a late 17th century witch consumed by flames, a mystic, and a woman navigating the challenges of war.

Huppert told Screen the film will dive deeply into “the theme of what it means to be a woman, what it means to feel out of place. By starting from the past, [Bernardi] can take us into the present and give us a very powerful reflection on today.”

It is a French-language film which will be shot with close-up camera angles, "using the face as a landscape, the face as a mechanism through which to tell a wider story about feminism through the centuries," Huppert said.

Italy’s Rosebud Entertainment Pictures and France’s Les films du Camelia produce alongside Italy’s Enormous Films.