The Koker Trilogy: Three Films by Abbas Kiarostami
Where Is the Friend’s House?, 1987; And Life Goes On, 1992;
Through the Olive Trees, 1994; The Criterion CollectionI
n the late ’80s and early ’90s, the films of the koker
trilogy—Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, and
Through the Olive Trees—elevated Abbas Kiarostami to the
pantheon of the world’s great filmmakers and inaugurated a path
toward his now well-known austere style, humanistic philosophy,
and modernist self-reflexivity. All three are now available in a
new set from Criterion (as well as in a touring retrospective that
begins July 26).
Where Is the Friend’s House?is depicted through the eyes of
a little boy desperate to find his classmate; yet on the way he
encounters a variety of villagers, allowing the director to repre-
sent a wider swath of daily life and explore the meaning of
friendship. Kiarostami twice leaves the boy’s perspective to focus
on two of the older men in the village, through them contrast-
ing rigid social orthodoxies and humanist values.
The paradoxes and incongruities that are so significant in
Kiarostami’s later works can be subtly detected in And Life Goes
On, a film that returns to Koker, the town in northern Iran
where the previous film was shot, and explores the boundaries
between father and son, the urban and the rural, the beauty and
destruction of nature, and ultimately fiction and documentary.
The village has since experienced a catastrophic earthquake, and
a fictional film director and his son have come to find that earlier
film’s young star. One old man they meet says that he played arole in Where Is the Friend’s House?, yet he is forced to perform
the “reality” that his house has not been destroyed. The protago-
nist—a surrogate for Kiarostami—replies, “After all, this house
has survived, so it is real.” Reality is artifice, documentary is fic-
tion, and, as Kiarostami once said, lying is the only way to the
truth in cinema.
These are the central themes of Through the Olive Treesas
well, which follows the efforts of a director to make a film with
nonprofessional locals. Though the directors—real or fictional—
throughout The Koker Trilogy have the power to design, shape,
and distort reality, the characters often resist their roles in the
filmic universe or in the filmmaking process: the little boy’s defi-
ance of his mother and grandfather in Where Is the Friend’s
House?, the old man’s discontent with his fictional role in And
Life Goes On; actor Tahereh’s refusal to obey the surrogate direc-
tor and co-star Hossein’s unstoppable pursuit of Tahereh in
Through the Olive Trees.
The great final shot of Through the Olive Treescan be read as
the apotheosis of one of Kiarostami’s recurring themes, “Who
has the power to shape reality?” And as the Iranian critic Vahid
Mortazavi asked, “Who has the power to look?” Though severely
criticized in Iran because of its exoticizing approach, pastoral
simplicity, and formal austerity, The Koker Trilogy now stands as
the strong foundation of Kiarostami’s later masterpieces and his
manifesto of uncompromised filmmaking.Azadeh Jafariis an Iranian film critic and translator. She has written
for Cinema Scope, Reverse Shot, and various Iranian magazines.74 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019HOM E
MOVI ES
Cinema spun,
streamed, and
beamed
DVD/DEBUT
BLU-RAY/DEBUT
STREAMING
EXCLUSIVE^ TO^ VODWhere Is the Friend’s House?Seeing Is Believing
BY AZADEH JAFARIThrough the Olive Trees And Life Goes On