Au travers des oliviers

Abbas Kiarostami's movies along the likes of Mr.Yasujiro Ozu and Edward yang are just like a calm stream of river that keeps on flowing eternally providing neverending relief, life and peace. If you have enough patience and interest these movies will never bore you, and you could even watch them for many hours if their runtime was even mkre, but at last provide you with a feelgood experience as their movies are so close to our everyday reality that they feel like the stories in them could happen anywhere around us in any part of the world. Third part of Abbas kiarostami's Koker trilogy providing behind the scenes outlook to "And life goes on...(1992)", almost feels like a complete story in itself about 2 youngsters trying hard to find eachother in all the tension surrounding, after the 1990 earthquake. The minimalistic director Abbas kiarostami does wonders in almost his every movie that many action directors could not, a true genius.

Through the Olive Trees is a great example of how neo-realistic techniques can show realism in film making. One personal criticism would be the music, but that is purely personal, and takes nothing away from the film. A masterpeice.

This epoch-making poem opens with a film crew trying to cast for a movie in a provincial village, in the aftermath of A DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE which has claimed many, many lives. We then are shown that the remaining people are trying to rebuild their lives, picking up bits and pieces of the past, but with an eye to the future.example of these people are the boy and the girl who are selected to play the protagonists of the melodrama to be made. The crew's interest interest in these people is limited to their role and usefulness for director's vision of the film, and no more. But-and this is a crucial BUT-the boy and the girl have their own agenda, and don't care very much for the screenplay dictated by the director (for instance repeated takes of the tea-serving scene): The girl wants to wear colorful and jolly dress, and the boy wants to be able to love her. Eventually, the boy follws the girl into the magnificent ending shot of the expanse of the olive groves, and into the ubncertain but potentially hopeful future. Will life, love and color be able to vanquish darkness and death? Will the boy and the girl find the courage and and power to fire the crew, the director, the casting agent , down to the ticket-vendor and become subjects of their own life and destiny? ... This is to be continued.........

I'd just like to disagree with those who suggest this film may not be accessible to people who have not seen the first two films in the trilogy. I haven't, but have not been as bewitched by a film since I saw Aggelopoulos' Travelling Players for the first time. My heart responded, the hairs on the back of my neck responded, my being responded. No matter if my brain wasn't fully au fait with what came before. Superb doesn't begin to cover it. How he captured these (non)performances from his actors is beyond me: perhaps, unfamiliar with the conventions of film-making, they were uniquely equipped to sidestep them.

Michael

I saw the movie while on vacation in Sweden. Just clicking through TV channels, I stopped on this movie accidentally, initially not paying much attention to it. But the images started to attract me, finally they got hold of me. The realism of everyday life with some strange air of poetic aura was fascinating. The action just floats like a river, no big happenings but pictures are dense, close to skin, close to feelings. The people dreams pour out into daily life. The shaky balance between reality and a dream culminates in the last sequence and we hope for an answer, which is not disclosed but we are left to search it in our imagination and in our dreams evoked by this wonderful movie. Maybe longing for an answer is all what is possible.