Review of Through the Olive Trees

After Kiarostami's personal journey through an earthquake-stricken country to find a kid he worked on in a previous film, he now adds another meta-textual layer under the entire thing, thus concluding his trilogy. I liked this more than Life, and Nothing More...mainly because of how interesting was the last third of the film.

We can talk for hours about the text and context of the film, what impact it has on the viewer if we take all three films as one...or just break down each so we can make another film. But for me it was a personal film of Abbas and his journey through the art of cinema in Iran. It's all linked to the medium, any way you take it.

It's also a view of how a director is like a god, in a sense that throughout the three film he guides people on what to say and how to say it, even to the point that they change the way they are as people, not only as actors. The last scene is exactly that, the director gave this confidence to the actor, and as another level the unseen power, the true director that is behind the camera we don't see, directs the director and the actors in another sub-conscience level.

It's has a bunch of layers and those layers have other layers.