Drama
Italian (L'albero degli zoccoli)
1978 · Directed by Ermanno Olmi · 187 min
Four peasant families share a Lombard farmstead in the late nineteenth century, working land that belongs to someone else. The film follows a year of their labour, courtships, prayers and small crises at an unhurried pace, with the texture of lived routine rather than the shape of a conventional plot.
Why it matters in cinema history
A late, major flowering of the neorealist tradition, it reimagines peasant life as a lived world with its own rhythms, and it anticipates the patient, observational strand of later European art cinema.
Watch with intention
Watch it as a record of a way of life, where small acts of labour and faith carry the drama.
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