Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. It’s time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first U.S. release from an icon of Iranian filmmaking. Unfortunately, Weinstein was involved — kinda.
It’s easy to forget how, once upon a time, North American audiences weren’t fucking with Abbas Kiarostami.
Of course, stateside cinephiles have collectively declared Kiarostami as one of the gods of Iranian cinema. Although he passed away in 2016, his influence can be found in movies made in his native Iran (like Mohammad Rasoulof’s Oscar-nominated The Seed of the Sacred Fig) as well as films made around these parts (like Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s latest quirkfest Universal Language).
But back in the early ‘90s, the films of Kiarostami and his Iranian New Wave elite were hard to find. Unless you were attending film festivals (or reading the film-fest dispatches of New York Press film critic/Iranian cinema cognosente Godfrey Cheshire), you wouldn’t have known Iranian cinema was a thing. Considering how tense relations were between the U.S. and the Middle East even then, there was a long patch when independent films out of that region were not easily accessible to Western audiences.
The 1994 film Through the Olive Trees was the first Kiarostami film to get a North American theatrical release a year later. It did more than take viewers inside Iranian borders; it showed us how frustrating it can be for filmmakers like Kiarostami to get one scene shot over there.
Trees is the final installment in Kiarostami’s “Koker trilogy,” a series of films set in a Northern Iranian village that’s still picking up the pieces after the Manjil–Rudbar earthquake of 1990. Kiarostami gets hella meta in this last one, basically doing a fictionalized account of how he made 1992’s And Life Goes On — the second Koker film — which is a continuation of the first, 1987’s Where Is the Friend’s House?
The Kiarostami stand-in is Kargardan (Mohamad-Ali Keshavarz), a jovial director who tries to direct a simple scene of a man walking up the steps of a home, coming down in a suit, and spending the rest of the scene putting on his shoes while talking with a guy. But it’s never that simple — is it?
It’s a straight-up recreation of a scene from Life, right down to Kiarostami bringing back the actors who appeared in the original. The guy performing all this action is Hossein (Hossein Rezai), a villager and on-set gopher who’s madly in love with Tahereh (Tahereh Ladanian), who plays his new bride in this scene. Throughout the movie, Hossein relentlessly pursues Tahereh, even asking her grandmother for her hand in marriage. (Grandma repeatedly turns him down, citing his lack of wealth and intelligence.)
It appears that Tahereh, who doesn’t speak to Hossein during the shooting of the aforementioned scene, wants nothing to do with ol’ boy either. Hossein even lurks around her when she’s at the cemetery, where her newly-buried parents rest. But he refuses to take no for an answer, even chasing her down a hill and into foliage (hence the title) in the film’s final, ambiguous minutes.
At that time, Trees was one of several eye-opening films that dropped the audience in the middle of a rickety indie-film production. (Trees came out the same year as Tom DiCillo’s comic Sundance winner Living in Oblivion, with Olivier Assayas’s seductive satire Irma Vep showing up the following year.) Instead of actors and actresses engaging in petty, production-halting snits, Kargardan (and Kiarostami) hires real Iranian villagers who are so set in their antiquated, patriarchal ways, abandoning them even while in character seems like sacrilege. It’s continually up to the director and his trusty production assistant Miss Shiva (an understated Zarifeh Shiva) to keep both cast and crew from engaging in conflicts that could make the already-tedious work they’re doing even more excruciating.
Trees should’ve been an engaging, empathetic primer for us Yankee moviegoers, a little taste of the fascinating celluloid that’s being created in Iran. But, it was bought by Harvey Weinstein — so you probably know how this shit is gonna end.
The story goes that Harvey and them got Trees as part of a package a French film company offered. By giving it a release in February — prime dumping ground for studios and distributors — it seemed like Weinstein wanted to slip it in some major-market theaters as quickly and quietly as possible. The movie didn’t even hit home video around here until The Criterion Collection released a Koker trilogy DVD/Blu-ray box set in 2019.
Trees’ brief, embarrassing rollout is a travesty that still makes some critics’ jaws tight. In his 2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See, Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum notoriously went after Miramax for dropping Trees and other world-cinema curios they acquire like discarded junk. Cheshire, who put Trees in his ‘94 ten-best list, also scolded the Weinsteins. In a Press column, he called out the company for saving its marketing and promotion money for more high-profile projects, leaving imports like Trees to fend for themselves. “I could not find a single ad in any New York newspaper for Kiarostami’s film,” he later wrote in his 2022 book In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema.
When the sexual-harassment allegations hit, it only reminded some people of the red flags they picked up on when he buried films like Trees and James Gray’s all-star crime drama The Yards. “To mess those releases up, whether through indifference or calculation or vindictiveness, is among the more contemptible acts I’ve observed distributors engage in in recent memory,” the New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote in 2017.
Part of me thinks that Weinstein didn’t want to go through the headache of trying to market Trees, a self-referential, open-ended finale to a trilogy American audiences have never seen or heard of. Of course, Kiarostami would have the last laugh. His 1997 film Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became a critical darling when it was released in the States by British distributor Artificial Eye (now Curzon Film). It also made cineastes pay more attention to what’s going on in Iran. Eventually, films from such New Wave mates as Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi and Jamar Panahi (who also served as an assistant director on Trees) would also make their way to American arthouses.
Abbas Kiarostami is, was, and will always be known as one of the greats of both Iranian and world cinema. But, like so many revered auteurs that came before and after him, he had to get fucked over by Harvey Weinstein first.
“Through the Olive Trees” is available to stream on the Criterion Channel. The “Koker Trilogy” is also available on Blu-ray via the Criterion Collection.
