Honeyland (2019)

Directed by: Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov | 87 minutes | documentary

Neighbors can make your life pretty miserable. Is this already the case in an urban environment, where you may already have the opportunity to ‘flee’ during the day to work or another daytime activity, in a residential environment where the nearest city is perhaps about fifty kilometers away on foot, that is disastrous. And in the case of the protagonist of ‘Honeyland’, Hatidze Muratova, it is even catastrophic.

The documentary ‘Honeyland’, shot over a period of three years, is about a beekeeper in her fifties, who risks her life to grow honey with a lot of love and respect for the animals and passion for her profession. She does this in a way that even vegans can’t fall for it. She only harvests half of the honey and leaves the other half for the bees. She manages to get by with patience and craftsmanship. She sells the honey at a market in Skopje that takes her four hours to travel (on foot and by train). In addition, she takes care of her blind and bedridden mother – bickering, but with humor and warmth. Hatidze lives in North Macedonia (formerly Yugoslavia), in a simple stone house. They don’t have much, but they have enough. Everything is in balance.

Filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska show unparalleled images of this idiosyncratic woman and her environment. The lighting, the structures and the beautiful life-drawn head of this woman, it is all of a hypnotic beauty and you could look at it for hours and feel a different, more relaxed person afterwards.

Then the arrival of a huge family turns her life (and that soothing idea of ​​the movie) upside down. Husband, wife and seven children set up camp near Hatidze’s cottage. It’s done with the rest. The children are noisy and often argue with each other or with their parents. Hussein, the head of the family, struggles to make ends meet and takes every opportunity to make money. A child every year, so those are some hungry stomachs that need to be fed regularly. And need clothes, and want to go to school…

Hatidze shows great resilience in adapting to the new situation and she clicks with some of the children (you can almost feel her grief at her own childlessness). Yet the balance has been disturbed. Hussein’s need to make money is too great. What she can do, so can I, is his thought about Hatidze. So he also decides to keep honey bees. The outcome can be predicted.

The great thing about ‘Honeyland’ is that it never loses its observational character. Of course you can blame the invaders for having no respect for animals (the way the cows are treated is also heartbreaking), nature and the old traditional way of growing honey, but their poverty is so great that you can understand this anyway. can afford. Yet most sympathy goes to Hatidze, whose wisdom and expertise should not be lost to later generations. ‘Honeyland’ is a perfectly executed documentary about neighbours, bees and enchantment.