The Wonders, Alice Rohrwacher’s second feature-length film, is ostensibly about a family of beekeepers in rural Tuscany struggling to make ends meet. But it’s also about fathers and daughters, reality television, idealized traditions and the loss of those ideals, with a cameo appearance by a grumpy camel.
Starring newcomer Maria Alexandra Lungu as Gelsomina, the eldest in a family of four daughters (a situation their German father, Wolfgang, gets endless grief over in their small community), The Wonders is quiet and lush, hovering between naturalism and supernaturalism. Twelve-year-old Gelsomina is the most skilled beekeeper in their operation, catching wild swarms, carting the hives to local fields, scraping down the honeycomb and keeping her watchful eye on the buckets filling with golden honey.
The family is committed to maintaining a certain type of lifestyle — free of heavy machinery, sanitation codes or child labor laws (though Rohrwacher doesn’t shy away from underscoring the danger of shirking such constraints). But it’s clear that the parents and a live-in friend have chosen this lifestyle, rather than grown up within it. They distrust the outside world. Their often pants-less father, especially, is determined to prove that the decision to leave that world was the right one. Played by Flemish actor and dancer Sam Louwyk, Wolfgang throws out an absurd platitude that seems to sum up his beliefs: “Pizzas aren’t planted.”
The trouble is, as Italian wife and mother Angelica (played by the filmmaker’s own sister, Alba Rohrwacher) points out to her husband, they’re failing. Hushed conversations behind closed doors allow Gelsomina to fully grasp her family’s dire economic situation. They work hard, but it’s not enough.

Despite the family’s proximity to poverty, Rohrwacher’s scenes of the countryside are bathed in golden light — it’s no wonder Wolfgang and Angelica chose to make a life here. The time period is present, but there are none of the distractions of modernity: just the land, animals and labor. This is where Rohrwacher herself grew up, the product of a similarly cross-cultural family.