Honeyland

A documentary about a wild beekeper in rural Macedonia. She lives a simple life in an abandoned village, making honey and tending to her mother. Things get upset when a nomadic family of farmers move in next door.

This is an elegant parable about over-farming and over-exploitation of natural resources. The beekeeper, Hatidže, has a hard rule that she must leave half of the honey she makes to the bees themselves. The new family move in and decide they want to also keep bees, but on a much larger scale. Hatidže warns them that they must also leave half behind, or the bees will attack her beehive. Under pressure to make more money, the family ignores her warning and her beehive gets killed off.

It’s hard not to have doubts about a ‘documentary’ that is so perfect in its narrative that it could be a work of fiction, but the film makers insist it is all real footage save for one scene of the nomadic family arriving in the village, which they got them to re-enact.

The cinematography is just incredible, and the material is perfect for every moment. It’s almost too perfect, but the film was made over 3 years with 400 hours of footage captured. With that in mind it seems plausible that you might be able to assemble something like Honeyland if you have that much source material. Then again it’s also plausible that with that much caught on tape you could tell whatever story you wanted to tell within the confines of the village.

That’s a lot of what was going through my mind when watching Honeyland and it speaks to how good the film is. You just cannot believe that someone is living a life like this in Europe in the 21st century, and you cannot believe that someone was there to film it.

A remarkable piece of work.