| The Tree of Wooden Clogs | |
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original movie poster |
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| Directed by | Ermanno Olmi |
| Written by | Ermanno Olmi |
| Starring | Luigi Ornaghi Francesca Moriggi Omar Brignoli |
| Release date(s) | September 21, 1978 June 1, 1979 |
| Running time | 186 mins. |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Bergamasque |
The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Italian: L'Albero degli zoccoli; titled The Tree with the Wooden Clogs in the UK) is a 1978 Italian film written and directed by Ermanno Olmi. The film concerns Lombard peasant life in a cascina (farmhouse) of the late 19th century. It has some similarities with the earlier Italian neorealist movement, in that it focuses on the lives of the poor, and the parts were played by real farmers and locals, rather than professional actors. It won fourteen awards including the Palme d'or at Cannes[1] and the César Award for Best Foreign Film. The original version of the movie is spoken in Bergamasque, an Eastern Lombard dialect.
The movie includes footage of several real animal killings, including a pig being gutted while still partially alive.
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British film-maker Mike Leigh praised the film in The Daily Telegraph's 'Film makers on film' interview series, on 19 October, 2002. Leigh pays tribute to the film’s humanity, realism, and vast scale. He called the film “extraordinary on a number of levels”, before concluding “this guy's [Olmi] a genius, and that's all there is to it”.[2] Leigh has described Olmi's epic of peasant life in Lombardy as 'the ultimate location film' : " Directly, objectively, yet compassionately, it puts on the screen the great, hard, real adventure of living and surviving from day to day, and from year to year, the experience of ordinary people everywhere...the camera is always in exactly the right place...but the big question, arising out of these truthful and utterly convincing performances achieved by non-actors, always remains: how does he really do it?" [3] When Al Pacino was asked by the AFI what his favourite movie was, he admitted that he "always liked The Tree Of Wooden Clogs."[4]
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