The Tree of Wooden Clogs

The Tree of Wooden Clogs Italian LAlbero 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 dor at Cannes and the Csar 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.citation needed British filmmaker Mike Leigh praised the film in The Daily Telegraphs Film makers on film interview series, onOctober 2002. Leigh pays tribute to the films humanity, realism, and vast scale. He called the film extraordinary on a number of levels, before concluding this guy Olmi is a genius, and thats all there is to it. Leigh has described Olmis 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 nonactors, always remains how does he really do it? When Al Pacino was asked by the AFI what his favourite movie was, he admitted that he always liked The Tree Of Wooden Clogs. ........

Source: Wikipedia