The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Omar Brignoli as Minek, the young peasant boy sent to school in The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection.
A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, The Tree of Wooden Clogs by Ermanno Olmi (Il posto) 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, one that celebrates its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledges 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.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- New 4K restoration, created in collaboration with The Film Foundation at L’Immagine Ritrovata and supervised by director Ermanno Olmi, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Alternate Italian-language soundtrack
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New introduction by filmmaker Mike Leigh
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Ermanno Olmi: The Roots of the Tree, an hour-long episode of The South Bank Show from 1981, featuring an interview with Olmi on the film and a visit to the farm where it was shot
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New program featuring cast and crew discussing the film at the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, Italy, in 2016
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Archival interviews with Olmi
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Trailer
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New English subtitle translation
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PLUS: An essay by film critic Deborah Young
