Honeyland

Amid the ruins of a remote, long abandoned stone hamlet somewhere in the Balkan Mountains of North Macedonia, lives one of the last remaining European women to practice an ancient tradition of beekeeping.

This visually stunning documentary and winner of multiple Sundance Awards, follows Hatidze Muratova as she goes about her daily routine taking care of her ailing mother in a small stone hut as she moves about the barren valley landscape tending to her beehives and collecting honey according to ancient traditions.

Without electricity, phones or transportation, her dedication and love of the wild bees is apparent as she respectfully safeguards her beehives, ensuring their sustainability by only taking from the bees what she needs, leaving enough honeycombs for the bees to continue their production.

It’s a quiet solitary existence but Hatidze seems content to live this simple way of life harvesting and selling her pure honey to the marketplace in the capital city of Skopje, some 12 miles away by foot.

Set in a world seldom seen in film, the breathtaking visuals are realized with starkly beautiful vistas showing a way of life now gone or quickly disappearing. It harkens back to a time when people worked the land in harsh conditions always conscious of the delicate balance of nature.

When a family of Turkish gypsies arrive with their herd of cattle, Hatidze is glad for the human company, especially the children that she befriends and teaches about the ways of beekeeping. But her trusting and generous nature is betrayed and her livelihood threatened when their father Hussein is forced to supplement his income to support his growing family by starting his own beehive business with disastrous results.

The naturally unfolding drama is a microcosm of today’s problems in society as a whole and environmental allegory. Being a docudrama, filmed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov over the course of three years, the experience of Hatidze’s hard life, which plays like a neorealist parable, is as real and heartfelt as it gets.

Honeyland recalls the early films of the acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami – Close-Up (1990), and Jafar Panahi – Taxi Tehran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) in style and setting; about people living on the fringes of society in extremely poor and desperate circumstances.

For those who are looking for an eye-opening experience and learning about how some people are living in isolated regions of the world, this is a must-see. But this film is more than that eventually revealing an important cautionary tale about our consumerist greed.

JP