Award-garlanded Italian director renowned for his commitment to realism and non-professional actors was a winner at both Cannes and Venice

Ermanno Olmi, the Italian director who won both the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Venice Golden Lion, has died aged 86. Italy’s ministry of culture announced the news, describing the director as “a giant, a great master of Italian cinema” and that his death was a “great loss to Italian culture”. Olmi died in hospital in Asiago, near Vincenza; no cause of death has been confirmed but Olmi had been ill for some time.

Italy’s culture minister Dario Franceschini said Olmi was “a deep-thinking intellectual who explored the human mystery, and described, with the poetry that characterised his work, the connection between man and nature, the dignity of labour, and its spirituality”.

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Olmi’s best known films were both major award-winners. In 1978 The Tree of Wooden Clogs won the top award at Cannes: a quasi-documentary study of 19th-century peasant life in the Lombardy region of northern Italy (where Olmi was born and brought up). It was acclaimed as the last great work of Italian neo-realism, and praised by fellow film-makers such as Mike Leigh, who described it as “an incredibly human film, such a fundamental film in terms of what we’re looking at, the whole span of human experience”. On its recent re-release in the UK, Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw called it “a dark, slow and mysterious masterpiece”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Tree of Wooden Clogs. Photograph: film company handout

A decade later, in 1988, his adaptation of Joseph Roth’s novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker, starring Rutger Hauer as a homeless alcoholic whose life changes when a stranger offers him a loan of money, went on to win the top prize at Venice as well as best film at the David di Donatello awards, Italy’s version of the Oscars. Olmi was given a lifetime achievement Honorary Golden Lion at the 2008 Venice film festival.

Born in Bergamo in 1931, Olmi made his first film in 1959, Time Stood Still, a study of the growing friendship between a man and a teenage boy cut off by a snowdrift on a construction site in the Italian Alps. In what became a lifelong commitment to absolute realism, Olmi used non-actors in the lead roles. Il Posto (1961), starred Loredana Detto and Sandro Panseri as teenagers taking menial jobs in a big corporation: the film made a major impact at Venice and Olmi and Detto married in 1963.

Olmi also made a string of films exploring religious themes, including And There Came a Man in 1965, about Pope John XXIII, the 1985 TV movie The Seven Last Words of Our Redeemer on the Cross, and in 1994 Genesis: The Creation and the Flood.

Olmi is survived by Detto and their three children.