Through the Olive Trees: The Language of Silence

by Fatimah Allawaim

There’s a moment in Through the Olive Trees when the camera lingers on the hillside, wind brushing against the leaves, light shifting through branches, two figures standing apart but bound by the air between them. That moment, like the film itself, speaks a language that exists beyond dialogue. Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t build his cinema through words, but through presence. In this world, the environment isn’t a backdrop; it’s a witness, a character, a mirror.

The olive trees, the uneven terrain, the repeated takes of a single scene, everything breathes with intention. The landscape observes Hossein’s stubborn affection and Tahereh’s silence like an ancient confidant that’s seen countless human longings come and go. Each leaf trembles with the quiet ache of something unsaid. The environment becomes the emotional terrain of the story, vast, patient, and filled with an intimacy that only silence can hold.

Silence, in this film, isn’t absence. It’s tension, prayer, and resistance. Between Hossein and Tahereh, silence becomes a relationship. It’s what remains after language collapses under pride, class, and tradition. Hossein speaks endlessly — explaining, pleading, performing — but his words only fill the space that Tahereh’s silence has already defined. She refuses to engage not because she’s weak, but because she knows that speaking would break the fragile truth between them: that love can’t overcome social distance, and sometimes, dignity must speak louder than desire.

For me, Tahereh’s silence is the most powerful dialogue in the film. It isn’t passive. It’s her agency. In her refusal, she preserves her interior world from being consumed by the man’s longing or the camera’s gaze. She doesn’t argue; she doesn’t soften; she simply walks away. In that act, Kiarostami transforms silence into a declaration — a woman’s right to remain unread.

The silence also extends beyond the characters; it shapes the rhythm of the film itself. The pauses, the repetition, the lingering shots of daily life all ask the viewer to listen differently, to notice emotion in gestures, sound in stillness, truth in waiting. Kiarostami’s cinema teaches us to see the world not through explanation, but through observation. The olive trees rustle not as background noise, but as emotional punctuation. They are breathing the same uncertainty as the characters.

So what is Through the Olive Trees really about? On the surface, it’s about a film crew, a love story, a rejected suitor trying again and again. But beneath that structure, it’s about the distance between reality and representation, between how people want to be seen and how they actually are. It’s about the fragility of connection in a world where class divides even the purest intentions. And it’s about how art — like love — can only approach truth indirectly.

Kiarostami uses the meta-cinematic setting — a film within a film — to explore the impossibility of capturing reality. Hossein wants to be seen as worthy, but every retake exposes the gulf between acting and authenticity. Tahereh, cast as his wife in the film, continues to reject him outside of it, dissolving the boundary between performance and personal truth. The camera becomes a mirror that reflects not their love, but the limitations of expression itself.

When I watch that final scene, Hossein walking across the field toward Tahereh, calling out her name while she disappears among the olive trees, I don’t see a romantic ending. I see the eternal loop of human longing: a man chasing what silence has already decided. The environment, vast and indifferent, absorbs them both. The wind becomes their conversation; the earth holds what they cannot say.

The genius of Through the Olive Trees is how it turns simplicity into revelation. Every frame whispers a truth about love and communication: that sometimes, silence is the only honest language left. That the most tender form of understanding isn’t in being answered, but in learning to listen to what cannot be spoken.

Tahereh’s silence is not emptiness, it’s clarity. It’s her choosing self-possession over explanation. In her quiet, we hear centuries of women who have learned to protect their truth from those who only wish to interpret it. Her silence, like the olive trees, endures, rooted, eternal, unshaken.

And that, perhaps, is what the film is ultimately about: the resilience of what remains unseen. The olive trees will keep standing after the voices fade, after the camera leaves, after the men have told their stories. Their silence is the world’s oldest language, one that doesn’t need permission to exist.