Distinguished Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos directs the great Marcello Mastroianni in this extraordinary and beautifully photographed tale of self-discovery. Mastroianni plays Spyros, a schoolmaster of late middle-age who, like his father before him, is also a beekeeper. Disenchanted and unfulfilled by his life, Spyros takes leave of his wife and grown children to embark on a solitary journey in search of the emerging springtime flowers for his cherished beehives. Moving from village to village, he encounters a young girl hitchhiker who awakens in him feelings that start to become an obsession. Charged with quiet emotional intensity, The Beekeeper is a moving and powerful film about a man's struggle to find release from the spectre of the past.

In this compelling drama, Marcello Mastroianni gives a tour-de-force interpretation of a disillusioned middle-aged man, a bee keeper who inherited the passion for his vocation from his father. After weeping silently at the end of his daughter's wedding ceremony, Spyros (Mastroianni) leaves in his truck to check on his bee hives and in the process gets involved with a winsome young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi). She makes some advances which he immediately rejects, yet it is clear that he is ambivalent about her. Next he pays his respects to the people who have meant something to him in his life: his ex-wife, an old friend, and his daughter. Each time he mysteriously truncates his visit, and the enigma of what lies unsaid deepens after he encounters the hitchhiker again.