The Tree of Wooden Clogs

The Tree of Wooden Clogs (L'albero degli zoccoli, 1978) is an Italian drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Ermanno Olmi and winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Shot entirely with non-professional actors from the Bergamo countryside, in the local dialect, the film runs over three hours and observes four sharecropper families on a northern Italian farm around the turn of the twentieth century.

Olmi tracks the families in parallel — harvests, courtships, newborns, funerals — with no narrator and no moral commentary. The central thread follows Batisti: a village priest urges him to send his young son Minec to school, even though the boy is needed in the fields. When Minec's wooden clog breaks and the walk to school becomes impossible, Batisti secretly fells one of the landlord's poplars to carve a replacement. That single act of quiet fatherly desperation sets the rest of the story in motion.

Olmi wrote no conventional script — scenes were improvised or drawn from accounts of actual farm life, giving the film the texture of recovered memory. Three hours feel shorter than expected here, which is the only thing that needs to be said about the pacing. Stream The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) online on iFILM.