HONEYLAND at The Screening Room

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HONEYLAND (2019) Cert 12
Hatidze Muratova. Directed by Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov.

A quite astonishing documentary that shines a light on a way of life that has barely changed in hundreds of years. In a remote area of Northern Macedonia, Hatidze makes a living from collecting and selling the honey from colonies of wild bees. Her guiding rule when collecting the honey is always "Half for them, half for me" to ensure that the bees have enough to feed themselves through the winter.

It's a precarious existence, barely enough to support her and her disabled mother. When a family of itinerant cattle farmers unexpectedly moves in next door, she at first warms to them, teaching one of their children how to help her. Disaster follows when the farmers quickly switch their attention from their cattle to her bees, stripping them of not half but all their honey, causing one colony after another to collapse.

Filmmakers Kotevska and Stefanov spent three years filming Hatidze's trials and tribulations and the results are quite literally breath-taking. What begins as simply a meditation on the hardships of rural life gradually becomes a dramatic parable about the dangers of over-farming and careless ignorance of nature's laws.