The Tree of Wooden Clogs

Our DVD Price: £9.99 RRP: £17.99 Save £8.00 (44%)   special offer Summer Holidays - from just £5.99! click for details Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 24 hours.  This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times   Earn 45 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info

Film Description

Aka L'Albero degli Zoccoli. Winner of the Palme d'Or, written, directed, shot and edited by Ermanno Olmi, this is an elegiac portrait of peasant life in turn-of-the-century Lombardy and a classic example of Italian neo-realism. One year in the lives of four peasant families, all living in the same farmhouse, is slowly revealed in a mosaic of small but stunning sequences. There's no hero, no antagonist, and no great wrong that gets set right. This film is simply a slice of life, a living documentary about rural existence, consisting of simple, poetic stories of children, weddings, sick animals and secret tomato growing.

Film Information

Technical Details

Film Media

2 Stills

View Stills

Reviews & Articles

Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review

Review by K Harvey on 25th April 2007

This is just one of the most authentic and absorbing films ever made. It has captured the naturalness of a time when people lived mostly by daylight hours, ploughing together, falling in love, finding the shoes for the children - thus the title - when a father chops down the lord of the manor's tree to make some clogs for his son to be able to walk miles to school. The privilege of education was too great to miss but the crime has its consequences.

I watch this again and again. The opening scenes draw you in to another world. It is a gem. Don't miss it!

Review by Lisa on 1st December 2000

One year in the lives of four peasant families, all living in the same farmhouse, is slowly revealed in a mosaic of small but stunning sequences. There's no hero, no antagonist, and no great wrong that gets set right. This film is simply a slice of life, a living documentary about rural existence, consisting of simple, poetic stories of children, weddings, sick animals and secret tomato growing.

It's a ravishing depiction of the changing seasons with real sympathy for ordinary people who live a very hard life. Their landlords exact a toll of two-thirds of their harvest, and by showing the injustices they suffer at the hands of those masters, Olmi reveals the viciousness of the old system and the bleak fight that has to be fought against the natural world. This culminates in a heartbreaking incident, when the tree of the title is cut down by a father to make a pair of clogs for his son to reach school, for which he suffers terrible consequences.

Olmi gathered together an ensemble cast of peasants from the area as actors, used direct sound and shot in almost documentary style. The result is a wonderfully authentic film whose characters exist so naturally that you are immediately transported to another time and place.

A testament to the strength of the human spirit, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a contemplative, unhurried and deeply spiritual film. Winner of the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978, it has become a model for many present day Italian film-makers and is rightly regarded as Ermanno Olmi's masterwork

Browse all Film Reviews

See Also...

Hand-picked recommendations of related films

Nostalgia Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky The first film Tarkovsky made outside Russia explores the melancholy of the expatriate. Gorchakov, a Russian poe... More >

Jean de Florette Dir: Claude Berri The first of two Claude Berri adaptations of Marcel Pagnol, Jean de Florette is framed by a love of Renoir (both... More >

Life Is A Miracle Dir: Emir Kusturica Set in Bosnia in 1992. Luka, a Serbian engineer from Belgrade, has installed himself in a village in the middle ... More >

Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Palme D'Or Winners

Including: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now Redux, Blow-up, Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945), Dancer in The Dark, Elephant, Kagemusha, La Dolce Vita, Marty, MASH.

View all collections

This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists

Moving films by Keith Costelloe

A list of the films that have an emotional impact and that pack a punch.

Create your own Film List!

Customers who bought this also bought...

Recommendations from fellow customers

The Leopard

by Luchino Visconti

Rome, Open City

by Roberto Rossellini

The Spirit Of The Beehive

by Victor Erice

La Regle du Jeu

by Jean Renoir

Les Enfants Du Paradis

by Marcel Carné

Other films by...

More films directed by Ermanno Olmi

Il Posto

View more >

For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk

© 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail