Through The Olive Trees- Abbas Kiarostami Free Jun 2026

Kiarostami exploits this tension relentlessly. We watch the director of the film-within-the-film try to shoot a simple walking scene. The male lead (the actor playing the husband) refuses to walk closely to his female co-star because he feels uncomfortable. Hossein, watching from the sidelines, shouts suggestions. Finally, the exasperated director replaces the lead actor with Hossein himself. Suddenly, the fiction collapses into reality: the man who actually loves the woman is now acting opposite her, pretending to be a different man married to her, hoping the proximity will convince her to say yes for real.

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. Through the olive trees- Abbas Kiarostami

The film is the third part of a series connected by the village of Koker and the aftermath of the 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake: Where Is the Friend's House? Kiarostami exploits this tension relentlessly

The film operates as a Russian nesting doll of reality: it is a fictional story about the making of a real film ( And Life Goes On ), which itself was about a real disaster (the 1990 Iranian earthquake). In this layer, we follow Hossein, a poor, illiterate bricklayer who is cast as an actor. He plays a man who is marrying a woman named Tahereh. In reality, Tahereh is played by an actress who barely acknowledges Hossein’s existence. He is in love with her; she is distant, perhaps bound by tradition, perhaps simply uninterested. Hossein, watching from the sidelines, shouts suggestions