Set in the high Dolomite Range near the village of Asiago (where Olmi himself lived for many years), The Scavengers recalls Olmi's Time Stood Still in its portrait of the unlikely friendship between two men of different generations, who share little besides a commitment to work and a common geographic (and personal) isolation. Set in 1945, the film follows a young soldier who returns home and becomes a scavenger to survive the postwar economic collapse. He befriends an older scavenger who slowly shows him the ropes, and together they comb the alpine slopes for scraps of fallen bombs, shells, and other remnants of war. “One has to reckon with Olmi's extraordinary ability to make bricks without straw,” noted Tom Milne in Time Out, “and here he constructs an entire drama out of the conflict between two lifestyles. Deceptively simple, it speaks volumes about our rat-race civilization in its vivid, quizzically funny way.”