It shares similarities with the earlier Italian neorealist movement, focusing on the lives of the poor and casting actual farmers and locals instead of professional actors.

"[2] The narrative of The Tree of Wooden Clogs revolves around four peasant families working on farms for the same landlord, striving to maintain a meager existence in the countryside around Bergamo in 1898.

Over the course of a year, the film portrays the cycles of life: children are born, crops are planted, animals are slaughtered, and couples are married.

A communist agitator delivers a speech at a local fair, and a newlywed couple witnesses the arrest of political prisoners during a visit to Milan.

[5] Leigh has described Olmi's epic of peasant life in Lombardy as the ultimate location film: " Directly, objectively, yet compassionately, it puts on the screen the great, hard, real adventure of living and surviving from day to day, and from year to year, the experience of ordinary people everywhere...the camera is always in exactly the right place...but the big question, arising out of these truthful and utterly convincing performances achieved by non-actors, always remains: how does he really do it?