“Keep your eyes on the ground instead of the stars-you'll always find something to eat there,” quotes a famished pilgrim in Olmi's neorealist biblical epic, a combination of genres that only Olmi would attempt, let alone succeed at. The film begins in a modern-day Italian village as loudspeakers advertise a Journey of the Magi pageant filled with “soldiers and kings, wise men and fools,” to be “reenacted by ordinary townsfolk.” Seconds later, the reenactment becomes the film itself, with each ordinary citizen now a soldier, wise man, or pilgrim in a procession led by the magus Mel(chior) to find the newborn King. No stage- or set-bound re-creation of the Bible here; Olmi dragged cast and crew on a months-long trek across the countryside in search of maximum naturalism, filming with available light and sound and ultimately attaining a heat-baked, dust-coated realism that would be astonishing for a contemporary documentary, much less a costumed epic set in biblical times.