Ermanno Olmi: now 77

"Work is not a damnation for man, it's a chance to express himself, it's the ordinary person's chance to be creative," says Ermanno Olmi. "But work as it is organised by society often becomes a condemnation. It annuls man." One of the great directors of post-war Italian cinema, and now 77, Olmi's career has been an ever-changing quest to capture the sacredness of everyday life, whether among city office workers in Il Posto, the film which first won him attention in 1961, or peasants struggling to survive change in turn-of-the-century Lombardy in his 1978 Cannes award-winning The Tree of the Wooden Clogs. "I'm interested in looking for small realities that have a hidden soul," he says. "I believe that in the tiniest reality there is always a soul and behind apparent normalcy there is the feeling of reality."

Two years ago he announced he was quitting narrative film-making and returning to his documentary roots. With Terra Madre (Mother Earth) at the IFI's Italian Film Week on Tuesday, Olmi, through local film-makers, covers the journey of thousands of small farmers and herders from over 150 countries to Turin to promote traditional farming. Having established the context, he launches into an extraordinary 10-minute wordless poetic evocation of man's relationship with nature, shot on a farm in Italy's Adige Valley, near where he has lived with his wife and family in quiet seclusion for over 30 years.

Olmi's spiritual concerns – he directed the 1965 papal biopic narrated by Rod Steiger, A Man Named John – set him apart from most Italian film-makers, except perhaps Pasolini.

"But I am not a religious film-maker," he says. "My idea of religious is not having rules but living the reality. If you fall in love with somebody, you change the rules according to the feelings you have. I tend to respect reality all the time because I think reality is more important than rules. You can't love by rules, you have to be able to love in total freedom."

Other highlights of the IFI's Italian Film Week include Carlo Mazzacurati's 2007 thriller, The Right Distance (today, 4.15pm); Open City, a documentary evoking the 1960s Rome of De Sica, Rossellini and Anna Magnani (tomorrow, 6.40pm); Cristina Comencini's romantic comedy Black And White (Wed, 6.40pm); and Pupi Avati's Giovanni's Father (Thursday, 6.40pm, closing film)