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

World War I, on the Italian front: an outpost high in the mountains, just a few metres from the enemy trenches, “so close we could almost hear them breathing”. All around, there is nothing but snow and silence, and in the Italian trenches there is cold, fear, fatigue, resignation and the absurd orders that arrive by telephone from some far-away desk, sending soldiers toward a pointless suicide. Loosely based on Federico De Roberto’s La paura, Ermanno Olmi’s last film is a melancholy ballad filmed entirely on the Asiago high plains, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the Great War. The trench is like a tomb of the dead, but up there, where thousands of corpses are scattered, “the cows will return to graze, the meadows will grow back, and all will be forgotten”.

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  Ermanno Olmi

  Honoured in Venice with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, Olmi was born in Bergamo in 1931. He is amongst the most prolific filmmakers on the Italian scene. Particularly tied to the memories of a childhood in the countryside, he has told of its most intimate aspects, favouring the sentiments of the simple life and the poetic beauty of Nature.