Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of the Wooden Clogs is an epic portrait of peasant life in late nineteenth century Italy.
Focussing on four families working and living on the farm of a landowner in the Bergamo region of northern Italy, Olmi presents a year in their lives, charting their daily activities and the natural flow of existence: birth, marriage, death, and the trials and tribulations in between.
Shot on an abandoned farmhouse in Bergamo, The Tree of Wooden Clogs utilised locals of the region for its characters and had them speak in their Bergamasque dialect. The end results are truly remarkable, the apotheosis of Italian cinema’s neo-realism movement.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is out in cinemas from Friday.
