To fully appreciate Through the Olive Trees , one must understand its place within Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy, named after the rural northern Iranian village where the films are set.
To understand the profound beauty of Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994), one must look at how the film dissolves the line between reality and fiction. It is a film about the making of a film, yet the romance it depicts is arguably more real than the script itself.
Kiarostami is known for his patient filmmaking. Through the Olive Trees features long, uninterrupted takes that allow the viewer to fully immerse themselves in the scene and appreciate the subtle performances of the actors. The Path as a Narrative Device
: Follows a director (a Kiarostami surrogate) returning to Koker after the earthquake to find the actors from the first film.
Kiarostami masterfully uses wide shots and extended long takes. Rather than forcing emotional intimacy through close-ups, he often steps back. This technique respects the privacy of his characters while allowing the audience to observe them as part of a larger landscape. The Legendary Final Shot Through the olive trees- Abbas Kiarostami
The cinematography in "Through the Olive Trees" is breathtaking, with Kiarostami and his cinematographer, Mahmoud Kalari, capturing the beauty of the Iranian landscape in a way that is both poetic and precise. The film's use of color is particularly striking, with the muted tones of the olive groves and the surrounding countryside providing a perfect backdrop for the characters' emotional journeys.
In the pantheon of world cinema, few filmmakers have blurred the line between documentary and fiction with the philosophical rigor of Abbas Kiarostami. As the leading light of the Iranian New Wave, Kiarostami constructed films that were not merely stories but meditations on the very nature of storytelling. While his 1997 masterpiece Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or, it is the final film of his informal “Koker Trilogy”— Through the Olive Trees (1994)—that serves as the most breathtaking and vertiginous essay on the relationship between art, reality, and obsession.
In Through the Olive Trees , the "good piece" is the realization that the olive trees do not care about our romances, yet they provide the stage upon which we play out our desperate, beautiful need for connection. The film teaches us that sometimes the most powerful dialogue is silence, and the most perfect ending is the one that continues in the audience's heart long after the screen has gone dark.
Through the Olive Trees looks one layer deeper. It is not simply a sequel; it is a film about the making of And Life Goes On . It zooms in on a tiny, almost incidental detail from the second film: the actor playing a newlywed husband, a poor bricklayer named Hossein, was, in reality, in love with the actress playing his bride, who rejected him. Kiarostami was so captivated by this real-life drama that he built his entire film around this moment, turning a "peripheral drama from Life as the central drama in Olive ". This nesting-doll structure is Kiarostami's great architectural feat. To fully appreciate Through the Olive Trees ,
The narrative unfolds through a series of fragmented scenes, which blend reality and fiction. The film's structure is non-linear, and the story is presented through a series of vignettes, often without clear transitions.
. The film is celebrated for its intricate "meta-cinematic" structure, which blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Cinema Iranica Plot and Meta-Narrative Structure
If you find yourself captivated by this film, exploring the other entries in the trilogy will greatly enrich your experience. Watch them in this order for the full effect:
The film also explores the idea of the gaze, both in terms of the way characters look at each other and the way the camera looks at them. Kiarostami's use of long takes and static shots creates a sense of intimacy and immediacy, drawing the viewer into the world of the film. Kiarostami is known for his patient filmmaking
The final twenty minutes of Through the Olive Trees constitute one of the most transcendent conclusions in world cinema. After filming wraps, Hossein, undeterred by Tahereh’s silence, follows her as she walks home through the winding paths of the olive groves. He carries a plastic bag; she carries a pot of flowers.
The narrative engine of the film is the off-screen, one-sided love affair between Hossein Rezai (playing himself) and Tahereh Ladanian (playing a role). Hossein is poor, speaks informally, and lives in a tent. Tahereh is educated, literate (she reads her lines from a script, while Hossein must memorize them), and comes from a family of landowners.
The plot of Through the Olive Trees is deceptively simple. In the aftermath of the devastating 1990 Rudbar earthquake in northern Iran, a film crew is shooting a movie. That movie, we gradually realize, is And Life Goes On… — the second film in the trilogy. The “director” (played by Kiarostami’s frequent collaborator, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, though the character remains unnamed) is casting local non-professionals.
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