30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

The life of a cascina in the Lombardy countryside, at the end of the nineteenth century, is marked by the rhythm of the seasons and the incessant work in the fields, side by side with the animals. The narrative arc of the film rises and sets around the hearth of the family of Batistì, who decides to fell one of his master's poplar trees in order to build new clogs for his son Mènec. For this reason, his family is thrown off the farm and, having loaded their few belongings on a cart, they leave in the dark of the night. Ermanno Olmi, awarded in Cannes with the Palme d'Or in 1978, weaves the memories of an intimate and familiar past to portray a feeling of time and human life that tells the everyday life of a peasant civilization now gone, without lingering in a pietistic glance, but building a personal realist poetics. Interpreted entirely by non-professional actors, in Bergamo dialect, the film shows us the story of four families united by the toil of a humble and poor reality, animated by rituals and legends, by proverbs, nursery rhymes and popular songs.

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  Ermanno Olmi

  Ermanno Olmi (Bergamo, 1931 – Asiago, 2018) was a director, screenwriter and author. He began his early career directing documentaries that describe the world of industrial production for Edison-Volta. After conceiving and directing more than forty documentaries, he made his debut film, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still) in 1958. His career continued for more than fifty years, with a rigorous and poetic expressiveness attentive to the description of the relationship with nature, focusing his gaze on the daily life of the humble, in the memory of his own peasant origins.