Through the Olive Trees / زیر درختان زیتون ( 1994 Abbas Kiarostami & scr, prod)

And so, the third in the trilogy opens with a man who describes himself as an actor playing a film director, casting for the part of a young lady at a girls' school. We follow the progress of the film being made, and particularly the role of a young man - an actor in the film - who wishes to marry the girl. About halfway through we realise we are actually witnessing the production of the previous film And Life Goes On! And there's a trippy moment where we see a familiar scene from that film being shot (a few times) whilst in the background, the now older boys from the first film, Where Is the Friend's House, look on! And to unify things it ends with another very long shot, taking several minutes, in which the young man follows the girl - who has said nothing to all his proposals of love and marriage - and they seem to connect - it's difficult to say at that distance, or to know what her reply eventually was, but it all takes place in very familiar locales from the first two films.

Hossein Rezai is the actor, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz the director, Zarifeh Shiva (the indefatigable Mrs Shiva), Tahereh Ladanian, and from the last film, Farhad Kheradmand.

There's still signs of destruction everywhere - most of the survivors have moved on. The humour is getting familiar now. There's a trademark thing that Kiarostami does involving characters who just don't listen to one another. Early in this the girl shows Mrs Shiva the dress she's going to wear. 'You can't wear that, you need to wear a peasant dress'. 'I could take it in.' 'No, it has to be a peasant dress.' 'Well I'll just take it in' etc.

Definitely the most interesting series of films ever made (more so even than the Antione Doinel quartet). Cousins reports that Kiarostami later made a film called Ten, in which the camera is fixed inside a car whilst a woman taxi driver picks up ten different fares. Kiarostami also strongly influenced Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a former radical imprisoned for stabbing a policeman. A few years later when casting for a film, the policemen himself auditioned, so Makhmalbaf scrapped the film he was making to make a film about the stabbing, A Moment of Innocence!