Through the Olive Trees

Through the Olive Trees (زیر درختان زیتون, 1995) is available to watch online on iFILM — an Iranian-French drama by Abbas Kiarostami and the closing chapter of his Koker trilogy, shot in the same earthquake-devastated villages of Gilan province that anchor the two preceding films.

A film director arrives to cast local villagers. He gives the role of the groom to Hussein, a young man who is quietly, persistently in love with Tahereh, the woman chosen to play his bride. She will not speak to him off camera. The shoot becomes a strange loop: take after take, Hussein delivers his scripted lines as a husband while spending every pause in between trying to get Tahereh to acknowledge him. Kiarostami folds the fiction into the documentary and back again until neither layer holds its shape.

The film is less about romance than about the peculiar stubbornness of hope in a landscape still raw from disaster. Its final shot — two figures moving apart through an olive grove, too far for the camera to follow — is one of those endings that critics and filmmakers have been arguing about for thirty years. Stream Through the Olive Trees online on iFILM.