It\u2019s easy to forget how, once upon a time, North American audiences weren\u2019t fucking with Abbas Kiarostami.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s Oscar-nominated The<\/em> Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/em>) as well as films made around these parts (like Canadian filmmaker Matthew Rankin\u2019s latest quirkfest Universal Language<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But back in the early \u201890s, 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<\/em> film critic\/Iranian cinema cognosente<\/em> Godfrey Cheshire), you wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 1994 film Through the Olive Trees<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trees<\/em> is the final installment in Kiarostami\u2019s \u201cKoker trilogy,\u201d a series of films set in a Northern Iranian village that\u2019s still picking up the pieces after the Manjil\u2013Rudbar earthquake of 1990. Kiarostami gets hella meta in this last one, basically doing a fictionalized account of how he made 1992\u2019s And Life Goes On<\/em> \u2014 the second Koker film \u2014 which is a continuation of the first, 1987\u2019s Where Is the Friend\u2019s House?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s never that simple \u2014 is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a straight-up recreation of a scene from Life<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n It appears that Tahereh, who doesn\u2019t speak to Hossein during the shooting of the aforementioned scene, wants nothing to do with ol\u2019 boy either. Hossein even lurks around her when she\u2019s 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\u2019s final, ambiguous minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, Trees<\/em> was one of several eye-opening films that dropped the audience in the middle of a rickety indie-film production. (Trees<\/em> came out the same year as Tom DiCillo\u2019s comic Sundance winner Living in Oblivion<\/em>, with Olivier Assayas\u2019s seductive satire Irma Vep<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019re doing even more excruciating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trees<\/em> should\u2019ve been an engaging, empathetic primer for us Yankee moviegoers, a little taste of the fascinating celluloid that\u2019s being created in Iran. But, it was bought by Harvey Weinstein \u2014 so you probably know how this shit is gonna end. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The story goes that Harvey and them got Trees<\/em> as part of a package a French film company offered. By giving it a release in February \u2014 prime dumping ground for studios and distributors \u2014 it seemed like Weinstein wanted to slip it in some major-market theaters as quickly and quietly as possible. The movie didn\u2019t even hit home video around here until The Criterion Collection released a Koker trilogy DVD\/Blu-ray box set in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trees\u2019<\/em> brief, embarrassing rollout is a travesty that still makes some critics\u2019 jaws tight. In his 2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See<\/em>, Chicago Reader<\/em> critic Jonathan Rosenbaum notoriously went after Miramax for dropping Trees<\/em> and other world-cinema curios they acquire like discarded junk. Cheshire, who put Trees<\/em> in his \u201894 ten-best list, also scolded the Weinsteins. In a Press<\/em> column, he called out the company for saving its marketing and promotion money for more high-profile projects, leaving imports like Trees<\/em> to fend for themselves. \u201cI could not find a single ad in any New York newspaper for Kiarostami\u2019s film,\u201d he later wrote in his 2022 book In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em> and James Gray\u2019s all-star crime drama The Yards<\/em><\/a>. \u201cTo mess those releases up, whether through indifference or calculation or vindictiveness, is among the more contemptible acts I\u2019ve observed distributors engage in in recent memory,\u201d the New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s Richard Brody wrote<\/a> in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Part of me thinks that Weinstein didn\u2019t want to go through the headache of trying to market Trees<\/em>, 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<\/em> won the Palme d\u2019Or at Cannes and became a critical darling when it was released in the States by New York-based Zeitgeist Films. It also made cineastes<\/em> pay more attention to what\u2019s 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<\/em>) would also make their way to American arthouses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThrough the Olive Trees\u201d is available to stream on the Criterion Channel<\/a>. The “Koker Trilogy” is also available on Blu-ray<\/a> via the Criterion Collection.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Through-the-Olive-Trees2-1024x576.jpg\")
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