Koker trilogy

Koker trilogy refers to a series of three films directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Koker trilogy refers to Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (a.k.a. Life and Nothing More, 1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994). The designation was done by film theorists and critics. However Kiarostami resists the designation, noting that the films are connected only by the accident of place (Koker is the name of a village in northern Iran). He has suggested it might be more appropriate to consider as a trilogy the latter two titles plus Taste of Cherry (1997), since these, he says, are connected by a theme: the preciousness of life.

Where Is the Friend's Home? depicts the simple story of a young boy who travels from Koker to a neighbouring village to return the notebook of a schoolmate. Life and Nothing More follows a father and his young son as they drive from Tehran to Koker in search of the two young boys from Where Is the Friend's Home?, fearing that the two might have perished in the 1990 earthquake that killed 50,000 people in northern Iran. Through the Olive Trees examines the making of a small scene from Life and Nothing More, forcing us to view a peripheral drama from Life and Nothing More as the central drama in Through the Olive Trees.

Kiarostami's three films are poised between fiction and real life, opening film to new formal experiences. They are his greatest work, argues Gilberto Perez.

Film critic Adrian Martin who emphasises Kiarostami's direct perception of the world, identifying his cinema as being "diagrammatical". Literal "diagrams" inscribed in the landscape, such as the famous zigzagging pathway in the Koker Trilogy, indicate a "geometry of forces of life and of the world". For Martin, these forces are neither complete order, nor complete chaos but rather what lies between these poles.

See also

• Iranian cinema