Dramatizing a year in the life of northern Italian peasants at the turn of the century, Ermanno Olmi's THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS pays loving tribute to both the neo-realist style of filmmaking and a rural way of life that no longer exists. Hoping to create a better life for themselves, a poor family decide to send their young son to school despite the crushing sacrifice involved. When the boy's wooden clogs break on the long journey home, the seemingly minor incident sets into motion a series of tragedies that reverberate throughout the peasants' lives. Olmi's slice-of-life film--which he wrote, directed, shot, and edited--uses this central story as a launchpad to document, in moving detail, rural life under oppressive poverty. As the camera lingers patiently over women handwashing laundry on the banks of a river or farmers preparing a pig for slaughter, the quasi-documentary images transform these mundane tasks of peasant life into an almost sacramental epic of grace and beauty.