For thirty years, critics have debated what happens in that final shot. Does she agree to marry him? Is the "slow run" a tacit acceptance? Or is she simply running away from an annoying man?
Kiarostami, ever the trickster, refused to answer. But the beauty lies in the ambiguity. The final shot is shot from the director’s camera position—the camera that was filming the movie-within-the-movie. That means we are not seeing reality; we are seeing the footage of the fictional film. In other words, the happy ending (if it is happy) isn't "real life" for Hossein and Tahereh; it is a take that the director can choose to use in his film.
Through the Olive Trees ends by suggesting that the only place love might exist is in the frame, in the act of looking. The real Hossein might go home alone that night. But the filmed Hossein, the one who exists for eternity through Kiarostami’s lens, might have finally won the girl.
Kiarostami’s style is deceptively simple. He favors long, static takes and deep-focus cinematography (by Hossein Jafarian). The film’s most celebrated sequence is the final seven-minute shot: a fixed camera watches from a hillside as Hossein, a tiny figure in white, chases Tahereh in black through a vast, green olive grove. They disappear behind trees, reappear, stop, and separate. No music swells. No cut resolves the tension. The viewer becomes a distant observer, forced to interpret the gesture alone. It is a radical act of cinematic trust.
The film’s greatest structural trick is its nesting-doll complexity. Through the Olive Trees is a film about the making of a film (And Life Goes On...), which itself was a film about the search for the child actors from Where Is the Friend’s House?. This layering is not pretentious; it is profoundly humane. It forces you to constantly recalibrate what is “real.” Through the olive trees- Abbas Kiarostami
We watch the director (a stand-in for Kiarostami himself) patiently correct his actors, move a potted plant for continuity, or shout “Cut!” just as a powerful emotion begins to surface. By exposing the machinery of fiction, Kiarostami paradoxically makes the emotion more real. The awkward silences between Hossein and Tahereh, the frustration of the crew, the dust blowing through a ruined village—these are not set decorations. They are the story.
What happens next is the stuff of legend. Tahereh finally stops at a fork in the road. She steps over a large ditch. Hossein follows. The camera, unable to cross the ditch due to the jeep's limitations, stays behind. We hear the dialogue move away.
Then, silence. The camera holds on the empty road. We see the olive trees swaying in the wind. For a full minute, nothing happens. We wonder if the projector has broken. And then, from the far distance, at the top of a hill, two tiny white specks appear. They are Hossein and Tahereh.
Now, they are so far away they are nearly indistinguishable from the stones. Suddenly, the female figure—Tahereh—turns around. The male figure—Hossein—catches up. For a moment, they stand facing each other. Then, the female figure begins to run. The male chases. The female stops, turns again... and the image fades to black. The credits roll. For thirty years, critics have debated what happens
Kiarostami offers no resolution. He offers no subtitle explaining what happens. He offers only an ambiguity so profound it becomes a metaphor for existence itself. Did Tahereh finally smile? Did she say yes? Or is she running away forever? The distance is too great to know.
This final shot is the key to Kiarostami’s entire universe. He refuses to be a god who closes the book. He is a humanist who opens a window. He understands that the most honest answer to the question of love, or life, or cinema is often: We cannot see clearly from here. The olive trees are in the way. The earthquake has thrown off our perspective. But we keep walking anyway.
The final twenty minutes of Through the Olive Trees constitute one of the most transcendent conclusions in world cinema. After filming wraps, Hossein, undeterred by Tahereh’s silence, follows her as she walks home through the winding paths of the olive groves. He carries a plastic bag; she carries a pot of flowers.
Kiarostami gives us a single, vertiginous, long tracking shot. The camera, mounted on a jeep, moves parallel to the two figures walking along a dirt road. But the terrain is uneven. The jeep rises and falls. The frame shakes. The wind blows the microphone. Between the camera and the couple, a thick row of olive trees constantly slips in and out of the foreground, obscuring our view. Or is she simply running away from an annoying man
The shot lasts eleven minutes. For eleven minutes, we watch a one-sided conversation. Hossein lectures, pleads, cajoles, and reasons. He talks about his house, his reading habits, the practicalities of marriage. He explains why he is worthy of her. Tahereh says nothing. She stares straight ahead. She does not run, she does not turn around. She simply walks.
As a viewer, you feel a strange suspension of time. You begin to forget this is a film. You are walking with them. The olives blur past. The logic of cinema—of cuts, close-ups, and dramatic beats—evaporates. What remains is pure duration. Kiarostami is testing your patience, but he is also rewarding it. He wants you to feel the weight of every unspoken word, every footfall on the gravel.
One of Kiarostami’s most charming innovations is the portrayal of the film director (played by Mohamad Ali Keshavarz). This is not the auteur-as-tyrant stereotype. Instead, he is a tired, pragmatic mediator. He doesn’t care about Hossein’s romantic obsession; he cares about getting the shot.
The most revealing scene occurs during the rehearsal of the "carrying the wife" sequence. The director needs Tahereh to look at Hossein with "loving eyes" as he carries her over the stream. But Tahereh, in real life, refuses to even look at Hossein. The director tries to coax her, then demands, then finally gives up. He tells the actors to simply go through the motions. Kiarostami seems to be asking: Can you fake love? If you perform the actions of love enough times, does love emerge? Or is the performance a lie that reveals a deeper truth?
Kiarostami (the real one) is playing a cruel, beautiful joke on his audience. We are rooting for Hossein, despite his arrogance. We want the fiction to win. We want the poor boy to get the girl. But the film refuses to give us the easy satisfaction of a Hollywood romance.