Olmi’s penultimate fiction film weaves a striking parable about the defense of faith in a world posed to deny it, in the story of the transformation of a church slated for demolition into a true haven for the poor and persecuted.

The modernist tendencies that Olmi flirted with throughout the 1960s and ’70s reached their most intense and abstract in this fractured family portrait about the unraveling of a well-heeled Milanese family over the course of a fateful summer.

A Milanese factory worker relocates to Sicily and leaves behind his fiancée in Olmi’s lyrical study of loneliness, which Kent Jones called “by far his most beautiful foray into modernist territory, simply because it feels so homegrown.”

For one of his most senses-ravishing works, Olmi imagines the biblical book of Genesis as a golden-hued visual tone poem, a meditative, lyrical expression of personal spirituality that finds transcendence in the beauty of the natural world.

In this haunting historical meditation, Olmi features actual World War I footage to capture a single snowy night on the war’s Italian front, as soldiers burrowed in trenches find pockets of hope where they can.

Il Posto follows wide-eyed Domenico as he journeys to Milan to interview for his first job. There, he becomes smitten with a young woman, Antonietta, applying for a position at the same company.

Olmi took a turn into Chaplin-esque whimsy with this rarely screened tragicomic fable about an eccentric mapmaker whose obsession with nobility leads to both unexpected human connection and serious legal trouble.

The spiritual humanism that runs through Olmi’s work reaches transcendent heights in this sublime adaptation of a novella by Austrian writer Joseph Roth starring Rutger Hauer as a homeless alcoholic who is launched on a surreal journey of the soul.

A group of young men and women are hired to work what turns out to be an epically strange dinner party in this subversive, Buñuelian send-up of one of Olmi’s recurring concerns: the conditioning of young people for the labor force.

Rod Steiger relates the life and formative experiences of Pope John XXIII in this unique homage to the beloved Catholic leader, less a conventional biography than an awe-inspiring spiritual portrait.

A philandering, middle-aged advertising executive’s banal existence is upended by two sudden twists of fate in this provocatively open-ended portrait of bourgeois moral breakdown.

Originally conceived by Olmi as his final film, this deceptively slight character study neatly summarizes the director’s spiritual and humanist philosophies via the story of a disillusioned religion scholar who leaves behind academia for the simple pleasures of life in the country.

Olmi’s quietly shattering requiem for Giovanni de’ Medici, the 16th-century military captain whose death signaled the end of an era in Italian history, is a hushed and hallucinatory meditation on corporeal suffering, spiritual release, and the inhumanity of industrial warfare.

Shot amid the scenic splendor of the Alps, this postwar-set pastoral explores the tension between labor and personal liberty through the story of a returning soldier who takes up the dangerous job of salvaging undetonated bombs.

The spirits of an ancient forest join forces to save its trees from destruction in this wondrous magical-realist fable, shot through with a gentle animist spirit and an impassioned message of ecological stewardship.

Leaving his neorealist roots behind in favor of sumptuous, transportive fantasy, Olmi blends elements of Chinese opera, high-seas adventure, and fairy tale into this sensuous and surreal retelling of the legend of a vengeful female pirate.

Made with the fresh exuberance of youth, Olmi’s charmingly inventive first feature traces the unexpected, odd-couple bond that forms between a middle-aged construction worker and a rock ’n’ roll–mad young man over the course of a winter in the Alps.

Olmi’s Palme d’Or–winning masterpiece is an epic, ennobling portrait of four families living and working on a wealthy landowner’s estate in 19th-century Lombardy, a work of monumental majesty built from an accumulation of richly observed details.

This sprawling retelling of the biblical story of the Magi is a provocative, uniquely elemental spiritual odyssey that forgoes preachy piousness in favor of probing philosophical inquiry and earthy realism.