Taking home several top prizes at this year’s Sundance Film
Festival, including the Documentary World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for directors
Ljubomir Stefanov and
Tamara Kotevska, “Honeyland”
offers an intimate portrait of a life lived in harmony with the natural world.
The film follows Hatidze Muratova, the last in a long line of Macedonia’s nomadic
beekeepers, living isolated in the mountainous region deep within the Balkans.
Tending to her hives of honeybees with a near monastic devotion, Hatidze makes a meager living farming small batches of
their honey to be sold in the marketplaces of nearby villages.
Her methods revolve around protecting and respecting these
insects — her rule is to only take half of the honey she harvests, with the rest
left for the bees themselves. The process can be anxiety-inducing: I couldn’t stop
shrinking down in my seat watching Muratova sticking
her bare hand into their stone hives while gently brushing away the buzzing
swarms.
Conflict eventually rears its head in the form of the
itinerant Turkish family who pull up in their mobile home and move onto the
plot of land near Muratova’s. With seven rambunctious
children and herd of cattle, the family threatens to upset that delicate
balance of Hatidze’s solitary existence.
As first she doesn’t mind the companionship, particularly
enjoying the children’s rambunctious presence. But as she chats with family
patriarch Hussein about her business, he begins to see an opportunity and takes
a stab at beekeeping himself. But he doesn’t have the critical understanding
and respect for the living creatures he’s exploiting, and his efforts threaten
to encroach on Muratova’s livelihood.
For a while Hussein seems set to become the villain of the
piece, but Stefanov and Kotevska
allow for a more complicated picture to emerge. After all, he desires only to
protect and provide for his family. In that way, he’s not unlike Hatidze, as she tends to the bees while caring for her
half-blind and bedridden 86-year-old mother.
The filmmakers spent three years filming Hatidze,
and their time and patience gives us a deep, affectionate appreciation for Hatidze and her bees. As it goes on, “Honeyland”
becomes a bittersweet ode to the fragile balance of all living things, and a
powerful testament to a life lived with care and simplicity.
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2019.
