Movies: Ermanno Olmi

With his family mired in financial troubles, Domenico moves to Milan, Italy, from his small town to get a job in lieu of furthering his education. A lack of options forces him to take a position as a messenger at a big company, where he hopes to rece...

Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her. One year later, Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during ...

A young man has a renewed interest in his girlfriend when he takes a job that separates the two....

Peasant life in a feudal farm in rural Italy at the end of the 19th century....

Andreas Kartak, a homeless man living under the bridges of Paris is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to. Kartak is determined to pay back his debt but circumstances, and his alcohol...

This impressionistic portrait of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics pays as much attention to the crowds and workers as it does to the actual competitive events. Highlights include an epic pole-vaulting match between West Germany and America, and the fin...

An all-enveloping darkness. Suddenly, a child's voice, frightened, questioning, pierces the darkness... The first flickering rays of light begin to sculpt mysterious shapes out of the darkness... Among them, a very old man. He reassures the child, ex...

A train travels across Italy toward Rome. On board is a professor who daydreams a conversation with a love that never was, a family of Albanian refugees who switch trains and steal a ticket, three brash Scottish soccer fans en route to a match, and a...

In autumn of 1526, the Emperor, Charles V, sends his German landsknechts led by Georg von Frundsberg to march towards Rome. The inferior papal armies, commanded by Giovanni de'Medici, try to chase them in the midst of a harsh winter. Nevertheless, th...

World War I, Italian north-eastern front after the 1917 bloody battles on the Altipiano. A group of soldiers face the difficulty of war in a story that unfolds in the space of one night. Events follow one after the other without any kind of pattern: ...

Via the Chicago Reader: "After World War II an Italian soldier returns to his hometown near the Alps and, unable to find a job, hooks up with a crotchety hermit who scavenges buried shells and bombs for scrap metal."...

An Italian professor seeks refuge in the quiet, peaceful ruins of an old building....

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Vittorio stops to help Kate when her car breaks down on a mountain road. When they meet again, Vittorio discovers that Kate has rejoined a circus after a long time away. He begins to learn about the troupe's buried past and Kate's connection to it, ...

Broadcast on RAI television in 1967, this charming featurette about a teenage boy’s first crush on a girl reveals director Ermanno Olmi’s love and respect for the dilemmas of everyday people, along with an early example of the kind of stylistic and n...

Laura, a woman of a certain age with full grown children who, by all indications should be leading a great life, but actually, she appears to have none. She comes from a wealthy family. Laura has made herself a lawyer with a nice practice. Her placid...

The aging, conservative population of a small, sleepy village in the Italian Alps are surprised to see that a former French professor has settled there with his young wife and their three children to produce goat cheese, in order to escape the wrongs...

Two middle-aged men work as caretakers on an isolated dam construction site high in the snow-capped Italian Alps. When one of them leaves for the valley to spend Christmas vacation with his family he is temporarily replaced with an adolescent boy. Th...

It tells the story of a general who is about to cut down an old forest for the sake of financial gain, but discovers that the forest is inhabited by invisible spirits...

The Lady (or Signora) of the title is a mysterious matron who lives in a crumbling mansion. Six catering trainees are brought to the castle upon its conversion into a resort hotel. They are ordered to prepare a special meal for the old lady, whom non...