E venne l’uomo – Un dialogo con Ermanno Olmi

original title:

E venne l’uomo – Un dialogo con Ermanno Olmi

directed by:

production:

country:

Italy

year:

2016

film run:

47'

format:

colour

status:

Ready (28/07/2016)

festivals & awards:

A Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2008; a Palme d’Or for L’albero degli zoccoli in 1978; a Golden Lion for La leggenda del santo bevitore in 1988: for over fifty years Ermanno Olmi has shown reality with all the rigor of a filmmaker who always feels himself to be making a new start. In his interview with the critic Federico Pontiggia, he meditates on his poetics, on human values, humanistic aims, and his hopes for human solidarity. He has given us a cinema imbued with silence, one that with its coherent strength and originality stands apart from today’s audiovisual background noise. E venne l’uomo is the clearheaded and sincere, passionate and profound, touching and amused testimony of a wise man, Ermanno Olmi, someone who through images, sound, and poetry continues to nurture his career as a filmmaker, his existential imagination, and a desire to know Humanity.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
Alessandro Bignami When I knew I had an opportunity to have an interview with Ermanno Olmi, I didn’t know what was more intense: the curiosity of getting to know a great figure in Italian filmmaking or the fear of invading the silence of his home in Asiago. But then Olmi’s disarming helpfulness and the intimacy that is evident in his interview with Federico Pontiggia “stopped time” and did away with any worries of mine, and left space for the tale of a life and of a view of reality that, like the coherence, courage, and nonconformity that characterize them, are always relevant and increasingly rare.
Federico Pontiggia The last of the great old men, and the first of the great young men of Italian cinema. Ermanno Olmi has the rigor, sharpness, and curiosity to renew and surprise even himself with each new film, without ever losing sight of the subtle leitmotif of all his work: humanism. To meet and listen to him means knowing and recognizing a singer of silence through images and sounds; he is a secular poet who has made films his parables, and the viewers his companions. In line with Camus, Olmi believes that “If you want a thought to change the world, first you must change yourself.” Deep down, when looking at his films we can even change ourselves.