Susan Granger’s review of “Honeyland” (Neon)
Nominated for two Academy Awards – as Best Documentary and Best International Feature – “Honeyland” revolves around a beekeeper who lives with her elderly, ailing mother in the village of Bekirlija in mountains of Macedonia.
As it begins, Hatidze Mutatova is walking along a narrow ledge on a cliff that’s high above a valley. Removing a stone slab in the rock, she carefully gathers honey from a teeming nest of wild bees.
Hatidze has always dutifully observed her culture’s ancient beekeeping rituals, taking only half the honeycombs and leaving the rest for the bees. She then sells her precious harvest at the marketplace in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, about 12 miles away.
But when a large, boisterous, itinerant family parks their trailer on a plot of ground near Hatidze’s hut, tensions mount. The patriarch Hussein insists on defying tradition, practicing selfish beekeeping, upsetting the delicate balance between nature and humanity.
Directed by Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, it was originally acclaimed at Sundance, where it won three awards. The filmmakers spent three years, chronicling and shaping Hatidze’s life and labors into a poignant fable about ecological and environmental disaster.
In Turkish with English subtitles, on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Honeyland” is an austere, yet incandescent 8 – streaming on Hulu or Apple TV and for rent on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.
