Filmmaker Angela Schanelec introduces Ermanno Olmi’s 1978 pastoral epic about a family of farmers in late 19th-century Italy.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Ermanno Olmi’s neorealist epic became a surprise box-office hit in Europe and was greeted as a miracle by critics who had despaired of seeing a return to classic humanism in the cinema. Olmi scripted, produced, directed, shot, and edited The Tree of Wooden Clogs, using actual peasants to embody turn-of-the-century tenant farmers in Lombardy. Capturing the rhythms and rituals of his people’s everyday lives with great precision, grace, and lyric intensity, Olmi also fashions a powerful broadside against economic oppression.
Angela Schanelec was born in Aalen, Germany. She studied acting at the Hochschule für Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and received a degree in directing from the prestigious Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. Her feature films as director include Places in Cities (98), Passing Summer (01), Marseille (04), Afternoon (07), Orly (10), and The Dreamed Path (16) which played the Festival. I Was at Home, But… (19) is her latest film.