In 1993 Marion Cajori had just won the prestigious Pratt-Whitney Grand Prize at the International Film Festival for Films on Art in Montreal. The filmmaker had plans for a documentary about painter Alice Neel, but it was 
her Chuck Close project that occupied her mind for the next decade – along with her children, and the cancer she’d been diagnosed with. In 1998, PBS broadcast her Emmy-nominated special “Chuck Close: Portrait in Progress.” Just before her untimely death in August 2006, Cajoli completed a full-length documentary about Close – one of the world’s leading contemporary painters. A culmination of her years capturing the artist, ”Chuck Close” examines the artist with a focus worthy of his own intensive work. It is a final testament to Cajoli’s passion for studying artists with an intensive gaze, for moving towards the essence of her subjects and what motivates them.
