Directed by Ermanno Olmi • 1978 • Italy
Starring Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar Brignoli
A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo. Filming on an abandoned farm for four months, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their own ancestors had, speaking in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar. Through the cycle of seasons, of backbreaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, celebrating its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledging the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS is intimate in scale but epic in scope, a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata, with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
Up Next in 30 Years of The Film Foundation
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Audience
Directed by Barbara Hammer • 1982 • United States
An incredible document of the LGBT film scene in the early 1980s (as well as artist Barbara Hammer’s off-the-charts charisma), AUDIENCE finds Hammer working in a more straightforward documentary mode than usual. Hammer interviews her largely lesb...
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Xiao Wu
Directed by Jia Zhangke • 1997 • China, Hong Kong
Starring Wang Hongwei, Hao Hongjian, Zuo BaitaoThe feature debut of visionary director Jia Zhangke announced the arrival of arguably the most important Chinese filmmaker of his generation. Left behind by friends who have taken advantage of the c...
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Mysterious Object at Noon
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul • 2000 • Thailand
Apichatpong Weerasethakul brought an appetite for experimentation to Thai cinema with his debut feature, an uncategorizable work that refracts documentary impressions of his homeland through the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse ...
