The Wonders

Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher drew on her own childhood memories for this prizewinning coming-of-age drama about a family of beekeepers struggling to maintain their impoverished utopian lifestyle in rural Tuscany. Maria Alexandra Lungu plays Gelsomina, the starry-eyed young girl torn between taking over her beloved father’s ailing apiary business or escaping to a more thrilling alternative world, epitomized by Monica Bellucci’s glamorous reality-TV hostess. Full of bittersweet nostalgia, gorgeous visual touches and charmingly natural performances, THE WONDERS elegantly dissects the eternal tensions between idealism and commerce, tradition and modernity, family ties and private dreams.