Through The Olive Trees- Abbas Kiarostami May 2026

The final seven minutes of Through the Olive Trees are arguably the most perfect sequence in Kiarostami’s career. After production wraps, Hossein is told that Tahereh has left the set and is walking home, carrying a heavy bag of plaster.

What follows is a static, long shot filmed from the director's camera position. We see an impossibly green hillside, a winding dirt path, and two tiny figures: Tahereh walking ahead, Hossein running to catch up. He reaches her. They walk together. He gesticulates, pleading. She ignores him.

He runs ahead, turns around, and walks backward in front of her, still talking. She sidesteps him. They disappear behind a tree. They re-emerge. He continues his monologue. She continues to ignore him.

Then, they come to a fork in the road. The path splits through a large olive grove. Tahereh takes the upper path; Hossein takes the lower. The audience holds its breath. Is it over? Did he fail?

As they move farther into the distance, Hossein suddenly stops. He turns. He looks at Tahereh. Then, he begins to run—not toward her, but up the hill to intercept her.

He catches her at the edge of the olive grove. They stand close together. The camera is too far away to hear them; the sound design is just wind and the rustle of trees. We see Hossein gesturing towards the valley, towards the tents, towards life. Tahereh stands rigid.

Then, she turns. She runs. But not away. She runs back towards the set, back towards the crew. Hossein watches her go. Defeated? Perhaps. Through the olive trees- Abbas Kiarostami

But then—and this is the miracle—she stops. She turns. She lifts her hand to her head, adjusts her white headscarf. Then, in the most subtle, un-cinematic gesture in film history, she looks back at him. And she runs slowly. She runs back to him. She passes him and continues up the hill. Hossein, stunned, turns to follow.

The camera holds. The screen goes black.

What happens next is the stuff of legend. Tahereh finally stops at a fork in the road. She steps over a large ditch. Hossein follows. The camera, unable to cross the ditch due to the jeep's limitations, stays behind. We hear the dialogue move away.

Then, silence. The camera holds on the empty road. We see the olive trees swaying in the wind. For a full minute, nothing happens. We wonder if the projector has broken. And then, from the far distance, at the top of a hill, two tiny white specks appear. They are Hossein and Tahereh.

Now, they are so far away they are nearly indistinguishable from the stones. Suddenly, the female figure—Tahereh—turns around. The male figure—Hossein—catches up. For a moment, they stand facing each other. Then, the female figure begins to run. The male chases. The female stops, turns again... and the image fades to black. The credits roll.

Kiarostami offers no resolution. He offers no subtitle explaining what happens. He offers only an ambiguity so profound it becomes a metaphor for existence itself. Did Tahereh finally smile? Did she say yes? Or is she running away forever? The distance is too great to know. The final seven minutes of Through the Olive

This final shot is the key to Kiarostami’s entire universe. He refuses to be a god who closes the book. He is a humanist who opens a window. He understands that the most honest answer to the question of love, or life, or cinema is often: We cannot see clearly from here. The olive trees are in the way. The earthquake has thrown off our perspective. But we keep walking anyway.

Taken together, the trilogy forms a meditation on cinema’s ability to confront death and preserve life. The final shot of Through the Olive Trees — a white dot and a black dot moving through green—is often read as an allegory for hope: even after devastation, the simple act of walking together remains possible.

One of the most audacious sequences in cinema history occurs in the middle of Through the Olive Trees. Tahereh, who refuses to make eye contact with Hossein on set (due to a combination of modesty, class prejudice, and stubbornness), must deliver a line of dialogue. The director asks her to look at Hossein and say, "It’s a long way, Mother."

But Tahereh, bound by her real-life disdain and cultural codes, looks at the lens instead. Or slightly to the left. Or at the ground. Take after take fails. The crew grows weary. Kiarostami—the real Kiarostami, directing this film—holds on the shot for an excruciating length of time. We watch the artifice of filmmaking grind to a halt because of a real glance that will not be given.

This scene is a treatise on the ethics of representation. Kiarostami forces us to ask: Where is the real truth? Is it in the scripted line, or in the refusal to say it? Is Tahereh a bad actress, or is she the most authentic person in the frame? By refusing to perform intimacy, she becomes more real to us than any professional actor could be. Kiarostami loves his non-professional actors because they carry the weight of their lives, their traumas, and their biases into the frame. You cannot direct that out of them. You can only film the gap between the script and the soul.

To understand the film, one must understand its context. The Koker Trilogy began with Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), a simple, heartbreaking story of a boy trying to return a notebook to his classmate in the rural village of Koker, Iran. It continued with And Life Goes On (1992), a meta-documentary following a director (played by Farhad Kheradmand) searching for the boy from the first film after the devastating 1990 Manjil–Rudbar earthquake. We see an impossibly green hillside, a winding

Through the Olive Trees is the third layer. It takes place during the production of And Life Goes On. Specifically, it shows the making of a fictional film within a film—a love scene set in the aftermath of the earthquake. The “plot” of the inner film is simple: a young man (Hossein) and his wife (Tahereh) have lost their home. They are given a new one, but the path to it requires crossing a muddy stream. The husband carries the planks to bridge the stream, and at the end, he carries his wife across.

The genius of Through the Olive Trees is that Kiarostami pulls focus from the fictional tragedy of the earthquake to the very real, very human comedy of the actors playing the couple.

It is impossible to review this film without addressing its legendary final sequence. After a day’s filming, Hossein follows Tahereh down a long, winding path through a green hillside—a rare burst of lush color in Kiarostami’s often dusty earth tones. He walks behind her. She walks ahead. He talks. She doesn’t answer.

The camera holds at a distance, then slowly pulls back until the two figures become tiny specks in an immense landscape. They reach a fork in the road. Hossein stops. Tahereh continues. And then… she turns. She runs back. The camera is too far away to hear a word. All we see is a small, white blur (her dress) moving toward a black blur (his jacket). The film cuts to black.

Kiarostami refuses to give us the audio. We do not know if she says yes, no, or something else entirely. He leaves the question open, suspended like dust in the air. It is not a cheat; it is a gift. The final shot suggests that some conversations—the most important ones—happen beyond the reach of language or cinema. They happen in the space between two people, across a field of olive trees.

1. The Earthquake as a Leveler and a Wound The 1990 earthquake, which killed over 30,000 people, is never shown directly. Instead, it is the invisible ground of the entire trilogy. For Hossein, the tragedy has a perverse silver lining: it destroyed Tahereh’s family home and killed her parents, theoretically making her less socially superior. He argues, “The earthquake changed everything… Now we are equal.” Kiarostami neither endorses nor condemns this logic; he presents it as a raw, human attempt to find hope in catastrophe. The rubble-strewn landscape becomes both a real memorial and a movie set—a place where art tries to make sense of trauma.

2. The Ethics of Filming Kiarostami constantly questions the filmmaker’s role. The director in the film is kind but manipulative, using Hossein’s real desperation to add authenticity to his fiction. At one point, he forces Hossein to repeat a simple line (“Good evening, sir. My wife and I are grateful to you”) over fifty times—not for technical perfection, but to wear down the actor’s ego. Meanwhile, Tahereh’s silence off-camera is her only form of agency. Kiarostami asks: does cinema exploit its subjects, or can it give them a voice?

3. The Unbridgeable Gap The central relationship is defined by what is not said. Tahereh never explains her refusal. Hossein never truly listens. Their final, famous scene—a long tracking shot following Hossein as he chases Tahereh through an olive grove—ends with a distant, ambiguous image. Tahereh stops. Hossein turns back. Then he runs away. We do not hear their words. Kiarostami refuses closure, suggesting that some human truths lie beyond the camera’s reach.