The Beekeeper

The Beekeeper (Ο Μελισσοκόμος, 1986) can be watched online on iFILM — a Greek drama directed by Theo Angelopoulos, starring Marcello Mastroianni. The Greece-France-Italy co-production competed at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival.

Spyros has just retired from teaching. His daughter's wedding passes and the house goes quiet, so he loads fifty beehives into his truck and sets off on his annual drive from northern Greece south. Somewhere on the road he picks up a young female drifter — no name, no direction. She disrupts his pace without meaning to, simply because she has no reason not to.

Angelopoulos shoots in long, near-silent takes — provincial roads, empty hotel rooms, the low sound of bees. Mastroianni plays it in near-stillness, a man in slow, deliberate free-fall. The film is typically grouped with two other Angelopoulos pictures from the same decade as an informal trilogy on late-life solitude. Stream The Beekeeper (1986) online on iFILM.