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Through the Olive Trees (زیر درختان زیتون)

Through the Olive Trees (زیر درختان زیتون, Zīr-i Dirakhtān-i Zaytūn) is a 1994 Iranian film directed, written, produced, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami, and the third and final installment of his Koker trilogy. It unfolds behind the scenes of Kiarostami's own previous feature And Life Goes On (1992), following a young non-professional actor, Hossein, who in real life has been refused in marriage by Tahereh, the woman cast to play his wife on screen. The film premiered in competition at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or, and it is regarded as a central work of post-revolutionary Iranian cinema.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	زیر درختان زیتون (Zīr-i Dirakhtān-i Zaytūn); international title Through the Olive Trees¹
Director	Abbas Kiarostami, who also wrote, produced, and edited the film²
Release	Iran/France, 1994, 103 minutes, color, 1.66:1, Persian²
Cannes	Premiered in competition at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, nominated for the Palme d'Or¹
Major awards	Silver Hugo, 30th Chicago International Film Festival (1994); Golden Spike, Valladolid (1994); Best Director, Singapore (1995)³
Trilogy position	Third film of the Koker trilogy, after Where Is the Friend's House? (1987) and Life, and Nothing More (1992)¹
US distribution	Miramax⁴

Spoilers

Premise and narrative structure

The film dramatizes the making of a scene from And Life Goes On, Kiarostami's earlier feature about his search, after the 1990 Rudbar earthquake in northern Iran, for the actors of Where Is the Friend's House?. In Through the Olive Trees, a film crew arrives in the earthquake-devastated village of Koker to shoot that scene, in which a young couple must perform a marriage dialogue. The actor playing the groom, Hossein (Hossein Rezai), is a homeless young bricklayer who in real life proposed to Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian), the woman playing his bride; her family refused him because he owned no house, and she herself objected that he was illiterate. Family and tradition forbid her from speaking to him, except within the fictional world of the film.²^•⁵^•⁴

The result is a fiction-within-a-film in which a real courtship plays out between takes. A well-known professional actor, Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, plays the director of the film-within-the-film, while the surrounding cast is largely non-professional, playing versions of themselves.²^•⁶ The same fragment of dialogue is performed again and again, each attempt slightly different, and the filmmaking apparatus, including the director, crew, and clapperboard, remains visible within the frame.⁶ The film ends with a celebrated long-held shot across an olive grove, in which Hossein runs after Tahereh to learn her final answer; the camera stays at a great distance and the outcome is deliberately withheld.⁶^•⁷

Kiarostami described the method directly at Cannes in 1994: "I think the things that go on behind the camera are more interesting than what happens in front of it. Actors in front of a camera become some kind of half-living creatures. They are only bodies, not themselves."⁸

Production

Kiarostami conceived the film while producing Life, and Nothing More (the international title of And Life Goes On) in Koker, a village in the township of Rustam Ābād in northern Iran. The 1990 Rudbar earthquake had killed more than 45,000 inhabitants of the affected community, and Kiarostami chose to focus on life, love, and nature within that setting rather than on death.¹

Working method. Rather than adhering to a script, Kiarostami encouraged his cast to improvise and often changed the day's shooting schedule if he judged the actors' mood better suited to another scene. The style made for long shooting timetables; the film took eight months to shoot.⁸ The cinematographer was Hossein Jafarian, and the assistant director was Jafar Panahi, who later became a celebrated director himself; Alain Depardieu is credited as producer alongside Kiarostami.²

The film carried French co-production and distribution involvement alongside its Iranian base, and Miramax handled distribution in the United States and other countries.⁶^•⁴

Place in the Koker trilogy

The Koker trilogy groups Where Is the Friend's House? (1987), Life, and Nothing More (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), all set in or around the village of Koker in northern Iran. Kiarostami did not formally plan the grouping, and he was somewhat dismissive of the notion that the films were linked beyond their setting, describing them instead as parts of a whole: "Film directors only ever make one film. You are just shooting fragments of the same story."⁹^•⁸^•¹⁰

Each film steps one layer further back from the previous one. The first is a straightforward fiction; the second dramatizes the director's search for the first film's actors after the earthquake; the third shows the making of a scene from the second, so that the trilogy moves from neorealism toward self-reflexive cinema that contemplates both life and the mirror, and the relationship between them.¹¹^•¹⁰ The trilogy, together with Close-Up (1990), established Kiarostami's international reputation and introduced post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to festivals and cinephiles worldwide.¹

Reception and awards

At Cannes in May 1994 the film won praise, and the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa likened Kiarostami's natural realism to that of Satyajit Ray, saying that after watching the film he thought "God had found the right person to take his place" following Ray's death.⁸ The film's most notable accolades were its Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes and the Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago Film Festival in 1994; its critical success, especially in France, paved the way for Kiarostami's Palme d'Or win three years later for Taste of Cherry (1997).¹

Other awards followed through the mid-1990s: the Golden Spike at the 39th Valladolid International Film Festival and a special critics' award at the 18th São Paulo International Film Festival, both in 1994; the Golden Rose Award of Best Film at the 13th Bergamo Film Meeting and the Award of Best Director at the 8th Singapore International Film Festival in 1995.³ That year, Iran also put the film forward as its entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but it failed to earn a nomination.⁶

Reception in Iran. The film's international success contrasted with its standing at home. Kiarostami had been forced out of his position at Kanoon, the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults where he had founded the filmmaking department in 1969, and And Life Goes On was his last film produced by that organization; And Life Goes On had been unpopular in Iran and attacked by some critics. From 1994 onward, none of Kiarostami's films were screened widely in Iran, and some were not screened at all.¹¹^•¹²

Style

Kiarostami keeps the camera at a real distance from his characters, letting them shrink against olive terraces and earthquake rubble rather than filling the frame, and he avoids a conventional score almost entirely, letting wind, engines, and ordinary set noise carry the soundtrack.⁶ Critics have connected the film's long static frames and shots of movement within them, such as schoolgirls in black chadors gathering under a tree, to the fusions of painting, photography, and film in his later works Five (2003) and 24 Frames (2017).¹³ The film has been compared to François Truffaut's Day for Night as a movie-about-moviemaking, and its reflexive method has been described as Pirandellian (like Pirandello's plays: blurring fiction and reality, layers of artifice), peeling away layers of artifice to investigate the relationship between cinema and reality.¹⁴^•¹⁵

The film was restored in 2K for a Criterion Collection edition as part of a Koker Trilogy box set, with a new interview with Kiarostami's son Ahmad Kiarostami and a conversation between the scholar Jamsheed Akrami and the critic Godfrey Cheshire.²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films early 1990s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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