But the film did not end there. Instead, the rhythmic chanting of marching soldiers drifts in, and slowly the screen comes to life again. This time, when the hilly landscape comes into view, it’s spring, everything is green, and the grainy, discolored footage is shot on video. The soldiers march in formation onto the winding road in the lower left corner of the screen. This new view is surprising enough, but a moment later a member of the film’s crew appears, carrying the camera toward another man, who is setting up a tripod, and then Ershadi himself—Ershadi, whom we just saw fall asleep in his grave—casually walks into the frame, wearing light, summery clothes. He takes a cigarette from his front pocket, lights it between his lips, and without a word hands it to Kiarostami, who accepts it without pausing his conversation with the DP, and without so much as looking at Ershadi, who in that moment we understand is connected to him through a channel of pure intuition. The shot cuts to the soundman, a little farther down the hill, crouching down out of the wind in the high grass with his giant microphone.

Can you hear me? a disembodied voice asks.

Down below the drill sergeant falters and ceases his shouting.

Bâlé? he says. Yes?

Tell your men to stay near the tree to rest, Kiarostami replies. The shoot is over. The last line of the film is spoken a few moments later as Louis Armstrong’s mournful trumpet starts to wail, and the soldiers can be seen sitting and laughing and talking and gathering flowers by the tree where Mr. Badii lay down in the hope of eternal rest, though now the tree is covered with green leaves.

We’re here for the sound take, Kiarostami says.

And then it is just that huge, beautiful, plaintive trumpet, without words. Romi sat through the trumpet and credits, and, though tears were streaming down her face, she felt elated.

It was not until some time after she had laid her father in the ground, and shoveled the dirt into his grave herself, pushing away her uncle, who tried to pry the tool from her, that Romi recalled Ershadi. So many intense things had happened to her since she walked home full of joy in the twilight that she hadn’t had time to think about the film again. She had stayed on in London to take care of her father’s things, and when there was nothing left to take care of, when everything had been finalized and squared away, she remained in the nearly empty apartment for months.