REVIEW: Honeyland

By: Lilly McEachern

A visually and emotionally captivating documentary, “Honeyland” condenses three years of

footage into 87 minutes of a loose storyline with an intimate view inside the life of a woman who provides for herself and her ailing mother by practicing an ancient, laborious process of

beekeeping in the foothills of Macedonia. In the age of mass production, this method of

cultivation is all but extinct. Poignant and charming, Honeyland is a subtle parable of a modern industrial dialogue with our planet and its limited resources.

With no narration and little dialogue (all in Turkish or Bosnian), “Honeyland” relies heavily on

auditory and visual elements. The persistent buzzing of bees carries on throughout the film,

intensifying in moments of stress. The Macedonian landscape is an equally idyllic and isolating setting – Hatizde and her mother, Nazife, seem to be the only inhabitants for miles.

The documentary abruptly begins with a stunning view of rolling hills and a vast mountain

range. But you have no idea where you are, what year it is, or who this person is you’re watching scale a mountain with no climbing gear. The camera follows behind Hatidze Muratova, a middle-aged woman in a bright yellow top and billowing skirt carefully but confidently walking along a narrow trail.

As if it were a secret hiding spot, the film’s protagonist turns her attention to a

particular nook in the mountainside and begins to extract honeycombs using only a rusted

machete and a mellow tone of voice to calm the thousands of bees that engulf her. She moves the honeycombs to a stone wall near her house, where she leaves half of the honey for the bees and takes the other half to the nearby capital, Skopje, to sell.

The visual juxtaposition of the uninhabited landscape with a contemporary cityscape and bustling street market is jarring. Aside from the high-quality camera work, there is no indication of modernity until this scene. Surprisingly, only twelve miles separates these two worlds.

The slow, steady pace of the documentary is interrupted about one-third of the way through,

when a shabby, noisy truck approaches from the distance. Out comes a small army of

rambunctious children and their parents. Meet your new neighbors.

Hatizde is friendly and welcoming to the Sam family at first, realizing they speak Turkish like

her. But once the patriarch of the family, Hussein, takes an interest in beekeeping to provide for his children and repay debts, the relationship sours. Hatizde demonstrates the proper technique but Hussein lacks patience and care, perhaps because of the urgency to provide for his family.

His rushed and clumsy beekeeping eventually causes all of Hatizde’s bees to die. A close-up shot on her face reveals a true anxiety, knowing months of patient cultivation have been wiped out by Hussein overworking the bees. Her resilience briefly cracks. For the first time, we see Hatizde defeated.

After their failed attempts to herd cows and cultivate honey, Hussein and his family pack up and leave the mountainside, leaving Hatizde with no honey to sell to provide for her mother, who grows more ill by the day. Her mother Nazife has not left her bed in almost four years and depends entirely on Hatizde. Despite living isolated from the world tucked away in the

mountains of Macedonia, the relationship between the two is refreshingly typical and relatable.

There is worry, frustration and affection. Scenes of Hatizde coloring Nazife’s hair or feeding her bananas are touching and intimate, but with melancholic overtones. On multiple occasions, Nazife murmurs from underneath the covers, “Why don’t you just leave me here?” Hatizde replies without hesitation, “Where would I go?” It’s clear that Hatizde has not been taken care of, but rather cares for, everyone she interacts with—including the bees.

The more chaotic and humorous moments in the film come from Hussein’s seven or eight

children (I lost count because they are never sitting still). They roam free around the land,

occasionally helping their father cultivate the honey or herd cows, but mostly rough-housing

with the cattle or each other. And they fight to win – I think back to a cringe-worthy scene in

which a child no older than 5 is thrusted into a splintered tree trunk and hits it with rib-breaking force.

She cries for a few minutes, but not nearly long enough. When the children are being stung hundreds of times while their father coldly yells at them to keep cutting honeycombs, it is these unusually candid scenes that exhibit the apathy that underscores their way of life. Pain is a by-product of labor and triumph. In order to succeed, sometimes you have to get stung.

Directors Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska gathered over 400 hours of footage of

Hatidze and her mother Nazife, mirroring this exercise of cultivation that is patient and

conceptual. Hussein’s scurried and exploitative technique produce short term gains, but he

abandons the landscape as soon as it stops producing desired results. The fragile relationship between human and nature is both revered and exploited in this film, contemplating larger themes of human impact on the landscape and disrupting the natural order.