Through the Olive Trees

In the final instalment of Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy, a film crew arrives in an isolated village in northern Iran, which was devastated by the earthquake of 1990, to shoot the film And Life Goes On. Hossein, a young bricklayer, is offered a small role in the film, and is delighted to find that the young woman he has been courting, Farkhonde, will be playing the part of his wife. Having been rejected by Farkhonde's family as a suitor because he is homeless and illiterate, Hossein seizes the chance to persist in his wooing of the uninterested young woman. Kiarostami exploits the complications that arise from the tension between the actors' real-life selves and their fictional ones with a bittersweet mixture of farce and formalism.