| Director | Alice Rohrwacher |
|---|---|
| Box office | $1.8 million |
A small community of sharecroppers live in primitive circumstances in L'Inviolata, an Italian tobacco estate. Taken advantage of their complete isolation from the outside world, they are kept in a state of perpetual debt slavery by Marchioness Alfonsina De Luna. Among them is Lazzaro, a good-natured and diligent farmhand, who follows every command of the De Luna family and his fellow peasants.
Tancredi, the rebellious son of the marchioness, befriends Lazzaro and runs away with him into the surrounding badlands in a self-kidnapping plot. He gifts Lazzaro a broken slingshot, and offhandedly suggests that they may be half-brothers. His mother initially dismisses the kidnapping as a prank, but the estate manager's daughter Teresa manages to reach out to the police. The Carabinieri arrive and are astonished to discover a community unaware of the existence of public education and the abolition of sharecropping. They evacuate the peasants, but Lazzaro, still in the badlands and startled by the police helicopter, falls off of a cliff.
Years later, a wolf nudges the unharmed and unaged Lazzaro awake. He returns to L'Inviolata to find the estate abandoned, and encounters looters stripping the De Luna villa of valuables. The looters eventually agree to take him to their squat in the city, where he is recognized by Antonia, a former resident of L'Inviolata, who is living in a squat a band of other former L'Inviolata sharecroppers. They tell him of the estate's fate: the discovery precipitated a massive scandal, leading to the fall of the marchioness. However, struggling to adapt to modern life following their evacuation, some of the former peasants were reduced to homelessness, living off petty scams. Unsuited for criminal pursuits because of his guilelessness, Lazarro instead helps the peasants by identifying and preparing edible plants growing in the railyard where they live.
One day, Lazzaro runs into Tancredi, and the two have a tearful reunion. Lazzaro invites him to the peasants' hideout, and he returns the favor, inviting them for lunch the next day. The peasants dress up and buy expensive pastries for the lunch, but when they arrive at Tancredi's rundown apartment, they are greeted by his now-wife Teresa, who denies that they were ever invited. She laments her and Tancredi's circumstances, blaming them on "the bank", takes the pastries, and asks them to leave. On their way back, moved by the sound of organ music, the band enter a church but are shooed away by a nun. When they depart, the music supernaturally leaves the church and follows them. As the band cheerfully consider returning to L'Inviolata as squatters, Lazzaro sits down and weeps.
The next morning, Lazzaro enters a bank with Tancredi's slingshot in his pocket and is mistaken for an armed robber. He naively requests that it give back to Tancredi "everything that belongs to the Marquis of Luna". Lazzaro has a vision of a wolf as the bank's irate clients realize that he is unarmed and begin to savagely beat him. As the Carabinieri arrive and Lazzaro bleeds out, the wolf runs out of the bank and into the city streets, back to the countryside.