Farewell to Ermanno Olmi, the great director passes away at 86.

The great director Ermanno Olmi passed away tonight in Asiago at the age of 86. He had been suffering for some time from an illness that had worsened in recent days: beside him were his sons Andrea and Fabio and his wife Loredana. The funeral, the family has already announced, will be held in a strictly private form.

Born in 1931 in Bergamo, he was self-taught and took acting courses at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan while working other jobs to support himself. Right from the start he showed considerable talent with the camera, and between 1953 and 1961 he pioneered the documentary genre-Olmi at the time was mainly interested in working conditions in companies.

He made his feature film debut in 1959 with Il tempo si è fermato, the story of a friendship between Roberto, a university student, and Natale, a worker at the dam where Roberto found work. Olmi is famous then for true masterpieces of film history such as L’albero degli zoccoli (1978), an episodic film with stories of peasants set in the Bergamo countryside of the late 19th century, Il segreto del bosco vecchio (1993), a film based on Dino Buzzati’s short story of the same name, Il mestiere delle armi (2001), a refined narrative of the last days in the life of Renaissance leader Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, and Centochiodio (2007), the story of a philosophy professor who makes an extreme gesture against his life as an intellectual and retires to live in an abandoned farmhouse in the Mantuan area along the banks of the Po River. His latest work, 2014’s Torneranno i prati, is about the lives of soldiers on the Asiago Plateau in World War I.

Among the many awards he has received are the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2008) and Best Film for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1989: the film also won a César Award and a Silver Ribbon), the Palme d’Or for The Tree of Clogs (1978), the Silver Lion for Long Live the Lady! (1987), the Federico Fellini Award (2007), the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno International Film Festival (2004), the David di Donatello, the Flaiano d’Oro, the Grolla d’Oro and the Globo d’Oro for Il mestiere delle armi.

“With Ermanno Olmi,” Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni wrote on Twitter, “we lose a master of cinema and a great example of culture and life. His enchanted gaze told us and made us understand the roots of our country.” Dario Franceschini, minister of cultural heritage, instead commented, “Olmi’s passing deprives Italian culture of a giant, one of the great masters of Italian cinema. A profound intellectual who investigated and explored the mysteries of man and narrated, with the poetry that distinguishes his works, the relationship between man and nature, the dignity of work, and spirituality.”

Ph. Credit: Friends of Piero Chiara Association

Farewell to Ermanno Olmi, the great director passes away at 86.

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