The Wonders

Alice Rohrwacher's second feature took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014 from Jane Campion's jury, at a point when almost nobody outside Italy knew her name. It is drawn from her own childhood on a beekeeping farm in Umbria, and shot by Hélène Louvart on Super 16 in the summer light that has since become the pair's signature.

Maria Alexandra Lungu plays Gelsomina, the competent eldest daughter of a German father who has moved his family to the Italian countryside to live outside the modern economy and is failing at it. Alba Rohrwacher plays the mother, Monica Bellucci appears as the improbable presenter of a televised competition for traditional farming families, and the film's tension is entirely between the farm's private world and the spectacle that wants to consume it.

Critics reached for Ermanno Olmi and the Taviani brothers, and the comparison holds — but the film's real subject is the moment a child understands that the adults' project is not going to work. Watch it alongside Happy as Lazzaro and La Chimera, both already here, and Rohrwacher's larger argument about Italy and its buried pasts becomes clear.