Ermanno Olmi

The saddest part was that many of the short didn't even deal with the future, but openly referred to or praised the medium's past. There's also a lot of doom and gloom, with some very basic visions of people not caring enough about arthouse cinema, or playing movies on their phones. Your typical old-man-yelling-at-cloud stuff.

There is only a small selection of directors who seem to have understood the brief, and they struggle to make the most of their limited runtime. What remains is a complete mess, with most shorts looking like they were made on people's afternoon off, and hardly anything that stands out. A disappointment.

Hauer's performance is pretty poor (playing an onscreen drunk rarely goes well), but it's the cheesy, somewhat listless direction that really hampers the film. The cinematography is dull, the soundtrack is horrible, and the drama comes off as overly sentimental. A pretty horrible film.

A cast of amateur actors does a decent enough job, but I simply don't care for the life of 19th century farmers. It's all very expected, characters are caricatures, their living conditions are dire and the lack of any real drama makes it a real chore to watch. The runtime just makes it twice as bad. Terrible.