The Koker trilogy is a series of three films directed by acclaimed Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami: Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Life, and Nothing More... (a.k.a. And Life Goes On, 1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994). 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 Iran earthquake that killed 50,000 people in northern Iran. Through the Olive Trees examines the making of a small scene from Life, forcing the viewer to witness a peripheral drama from Life as the central drama in Olive.
Abbas Kiarostami first came to international attention for this wondrous, slyly self-referential series of films set in the rural northern-Iranian town of Koker. Poised delicately between fiction and documentary, comedy and tragedy, the lyrical fables in The Koker Trilogy exemplify both the gentle humanism and the playful sleight of hand that define the director’s sensibility. With each successive film, Kiarostami takes us deeper into the behind-the-scenes “reality” of the film that preceded it, heightening our understanding of the complex network of human relationships that sustain both a movie set and a village. The result is a gradual outward zoom that reveals the cosmic majesty and mystery of ordinary life.
Koker trilogy refers to a series of three films directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 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
The Koker Trilogy
Official List