With Close-up and the first two Koker films, Kiarostami made a steady ascent in international regard, and the acclaim for And Life Goes On at Cannes suggested that the world’s most important film festival had embraced his career as one to boost. Yet his situation in Iran grew more difficult, despite, and in some cases because of, his foreign success. When conservatives shook up the culture ministry, Kiarostami was forced out of his position at Kanoon; And Life Goes On was his last film produced by the organization. The film was unpopular in Iran and savaged by some critics, who attacked Kiarostami for everything from glorifying himself to using Western classical music (Vivaldi) on the soundtrack to catering to Western preconceptions with an “exoticized” vision of rural Iran.

Rather nervily, Kiarostami begins Through the Olive Trees, which dramatizes the making of And Life Goes On, in ways that seem to mock some of these charges. In fact, in choosing a well-known, imposing actor, Mohammad Ali Keshavarz, to play the director of And Life Goes On, he arguably mocks both himself and the idea that he was becoming a foreign-proclaimed grand auteur. In the original version of the film, the first music heard may have been even more objectionable to Iranian purists than Vivaldi: a sample from the Pink Floyd song “Time,” playing on a popular morning-radio show (this was later removed due to rights issues). As for exoticizing Iran, the film’s first scene, of the director auditioning a bevy of black-chador-clad schoolgirls in a field, almost seems designed to startle the Western gaze and annoy Iranians suspicious of it.

Through the Olive Trees differs from its two predecessors in showing the filmmaking process itself. Rather than considering cinema as a mirror held up to life, it contemplates both life and the mirror, as well as the relationship between them. Its self-consciousness begins in the first shot, in which Keshavarz, speaking directly to the camera (a device not previously seen in a Kiarostami feature), introduces himself by name and says he “plays the director in this film.” Trailed by his trusty chador-clad assistant, Mrs. Shiva (Zarifeh Shiva), he then begins interviewing the schoolgirls. The third and prettiest they come upon says her name is Tahereh Ladanian.

The next scene begins with a long, unbroken shot from Mrs. Shiva’s point of view as her pickup truck speeds along a rural road, where she picks up a man who says he played the teacher in Where Is the Friend’s House? and, though he “doesn’t like film or art,” would appreciate a part in the current film. Later, she will pass and briefly speak with the now-teenage Babak and Ahmad Ahmadpour, a moment that reiterates this film’s connection to the first Koker film while offhandedly answering the crucial question left unanswered by the second.

At Tahereh’s home, Mrs. Shiva finds that the girl is not there and ready to leave for the filming. When Tahereh shows up, she’s carrying a modern, stylish dress she has borrowed from a friend and wants to wear in the movie. Mrs. Shiva explains several times that this won’t do; she’s supposed to wear a peasant dress. When Tahereh persists, it’s clear that she thinks she’s representing herself on-screen, not the girl from And Life Goes On. The scene also makes the wry point that some rural Iranians resist being “exoticized.”

On the movie set, difficulties begin immediately, but the stubborn, recalcitrant Tahereh isn’t the initial cause. In a composition that will be seen repeatedly, the girl sits on the upper balcony of a two-story Koker home; Kheradmand stands below. They are shooting a scene from And Life Goes On, and frequent reverse shots show the main crew, including the director (Keshavarz) and Through the Olive Trees’ actual cinematographer, Hossein Jafarian (later scenes also show the actual assistant director, Jafar Panahi, whose debut feature, The White Balloon, scripted by Kiarostami, would win the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1995). When the director calls action, a young man carrying a bag of plaster comes in, speaks to Kheradmand, and climbs to the second story, but fails to deliver his line to Tahereh. After the third botched take, he tells the director why: a girl’s presence makes him stammer.

The exasperated director tells Mrs. Shiva to go fetch Hossein from the crew’s camp and rehearse the boy’s lines on the way back. (Hossein Rezai was a tea boy on And Life Goes On who acted in the film after an actor flubbed his lines.) She does as she’s told, but when they get onto the set and try to do the scene, Hossein doesn’t say his line to Tahereh. He complains that she won’t speak to him. (Tahereh Ladanian did not appear in the previous film; the girl who played the part actually did dislike Hossein, and refused to act in Through the Olive Trees.)

Sensing something amiss between the two actors, the director takes Hossein on a drive in the pickup and asks about it. Hossein replies at length about how he first saw Tahereh shortly before the earthquake and instantly fell in love, seeing her as the girl he’d like to marry. But she was unresponsive, and her family opposed his interest. Then came the earthquake, like a “sigh from my heart,” which killed members of both of their families. He saw the girl in the cemetery on the second day of mourning, and again on the seventieth. In the latter encounter (visualized in flashback, an unusual device for Kiarostami), she gives him a fleeting look that he interprets as meaning his attentions are not unwanted.

The girl’s grandmother, her guardian following her parents’ deaths, makes plain her objections to Hossein as a suitor, however: he doesn’t have a house and is illiterate, which virtually dooms him to a life of low-paying manual labor. This is the crux of the film’s drama, and it occasions a remarkable scene in which the director listens as Hossein pours out his heart, arguing for a kind of cosmic justice that would heal the world and his own life: the rich should marry the poor, the educated should marry the illiterate, landowners should marry the homeless. Much as the poor cinephile’s courtroom testimony does in Close-up, this monologue resonates with the disappointment of many Iranians that the Revolution didn’t deliver a more egalitarian society but continued the divisions between rich and poor.

When filming resumes, we’re in the scene in which Tahereh and Hossein discuss his lost socks on the second floor, then he descends the stairs, finds the socks, and talks to Kheradmand about the earthquake’s aftermath. Hossein flubs his lines and, between the four takes, goes upstairs to speak with Tahereh, saying how good a husband he would be, pleading with her to give him a sign such as turning the page in the book she’s reading. She ignores him and doesn’t turn the page. After the scene is completed and Hossein resumes his former role as tea boy, bringing cups to everyone in the company, filming resumes, and this time it’s Tahereh who botches her lines, though in a way that seems deliberate: she refuses to address Hossein as “Mr. Hossein.”

Compared with the documentary-like style of And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees is stately and elegantly composed, with muted naturalistic views of landscapes and the repeated use of symmetrical compositions in the filmmaking scenes. The lyrically understated style helps set up the power of its final scene, which begins after the day’s shooting has finished and Tahereh, rather than waiting for a ride, sets off to walk home, wearing her peasant costume and carrying a flowerpot. Hossein runs after her.

She climbs the zigzag hill, and he follows. When both enter the olive grove on the other side, he begins again to tell her how good their marriage could be, urging her to forget the prejudiced advice of elders. He’s sure her look in the cemetery meant something, and he wants only for her to turn and acknowledge him. She keeps walking. But something else happens here, something that brings the trilogy’s literary/mystical elements back into play: the director emerges on the top of the zigzag hill, gazing down on his two rapidly departing actors with a look that seems less one of personal concern than one of a Prospero-like magus surveying the unfolding of his creation.

Like And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees ends with an extreme long shot that runs for several minutes. But this time it’s not an anonymous third-person view looking up at a hill. It’s the gaze of the director looking downward from the position of the zigzag hill’s lone tree. What he sees: the ever-smaller figures of Hossein and Tahereh continuing to move through the olive grove, then emerging from it and continuing along a path on its far side. The path veers right and is almost out of sight when Tahereh apparently stops suddenly and turns to Hossein. After a few moments, he turns and begins to run in the direction whence he came, and his movement seems jubilant.

So her heart turned and she gave him the answer he sought? Or is this his fantasy? Or a wishful reading that most viewers will supply based on their sympathy for him and the image’s ambiguity? Or is it an assertion of the artist’s power to shape the reality he or she creates—in this case: benevolently, generously, humanely—in ways that may influence the reality to which the artwork refers? If Kiarostami’s cinema is one of questions, such are the ones that Through the Olive Trees and The Koker Trilogy leave us with.

With its intricately interlocked narratives, its multiplicity of director figures (including Kiarostami himself, who appears briefly in Through the Olive Trees) and host of engaging performances by nonactors (plus one professional actor), its range of expressive stylistic strategies and evocations of Iran’s natural beauty and traditional village culture, its spirit of generosity and inquisitive intelligence, The Koker Trilogy stands as a masterpiece of both Iranian and world cinema. From an aesthetic perspective, it can be seen as marking a journey from the influence of neorealism (Where Is the Friend’s House?) through nouvelle-vague-style self-reflexive modernism (And Life Goes On) to playfully deconstructive postmodernism (Through the Olive Trees). In thus connecting West and East, and the major eras of modern filmmaking, it asserts both Kiarostami’s essential orientations and the global significance of the New Iranian Cinema. And it does all this not as a schematic or essentially cerebral work but as a deeply personal testament; for each of the three films, and The Koker Trilogy overall, are ones from the heart.