Glorious Honeyland deserves all the buzz it’s receiving
Honeyland (M, 85 mins) Directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov Reviewed by James Croot ★★★★ In Turkish, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian with English subtitles.
When co-directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov began this project, it was a government-funded short about Macedonia’s Bregalnica River. That was before they met Hatidze Muratova. Thank goodness they did, because the result is a beautifully crafted and compelling human drama fully deserving of the plaudits and nominations it has received.
The first film to be nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, Honeyland looks at the life of the Turkish-born 50-something
Muratova, a woman billed as Europe’s last wild bee hunter.
Home is the remote and crumbling rural village (without electricity or running water) of Bekirlijai, where she’s joined by her virtually immobile 85-year-old mother, a ragged assortment of domestic animals, and her beloved bees. Blaming her late husband for denying her daughter the chance to marry, Nazife Muratova jokes that she’s ‘‘not dying, just making your life a misery’’.
To everyone’ surprise, surely including the film-makers, that ‘‘misery’’ actually comes in the form of the Muratova’s new noisy neighbours, the Sams, and their chaotic attempts to control their livestock and seven children.
While she fosters cordial relations, even taking one of the boys under her wing, head of the Sam household, Hussein, is intrigued by her bee business model and decides to set up his own colony – without doing due diligence. Distilled from more than 400 hours of footage shot over three years, Kotevska and Stefanov have created a masterclass of tension building, a heartwrenching portrait of hard-scrabble existence and a terrific allegory for our sometimes callous treatment of Mother Earth.
At times unflinchingly and painfully intimate, Honeyland’s eye for detail is so stunning that in some scenes you can even see virtually every fleck of dust.