The Tree of Wooden Clogs
L'albero degli zoccoli
1978
Palme d'Or — 31st Cannes Film Festival
- Director:
- Ermanno Olmi
- Starring:
- Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar Brignoli
Log in to track watched/owned status.
Over the course of a year in 1898, the film follows four peasant families sharing a farmhouse on a Lombard landlord's estate near Bergamo, observing their labor, faith, and small joys with unhurried, near-documentary detail. Political unrest simmers at the edges of their world, glimpsed through a communist agitator's speech and a newlywed couple's brush with political arrests in Milan, but the families remain largely absorbed in daily survival. When one father cuts down a tree to make wooden clogs for his son's schooling, the landlord evicts the family, and the others can only watch them leave and quietly reflect on their own precarious place.