The opening drone-shot of “Honeyland” is of an old woman walking in a remote wilderness hinterland. As she walks, a huge jackrabbit is startled and bounds away.
It looks a lot like Mexico, but it’s actually Macedonia. The woman, Hatidze Muratova, climbs a long, stony ridge. At the highest outcropping, she rolls away a large but thin stone flake, behind which hang perfect, golden honeycombs.
The fuzzy, buzzing manufacturers of the world’s golden sweetness are currently threatened. If they die—we all die. We hear that so often lately. And while most of us don’t know the science behind it, one assumes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
The Beekeeper
Bee-whispering is a more apt description of what Hatidze does. She’s sort of an ancient, magical bee-nun, with her perennial headscarf, living in the Macedonian outback in a wee stone hut.
There’s more than a passing resemblance between Hatidze and the Wicked Witch of the West, only Hatidze’s not mean or green, and her long nose is not the result of Wickedness but rather the occupational hazard of what’s clearly been a lifetime of “rhino-apitoxia.” That’s my made-up pseudoscientific word for getting bee-stung on the nose a lot.
Hatidze is also a sweetheart: as kind, selfless, and giving as the day is long. As mentioned, she cares for bees, but she also cares for her wizened, little, bedridden, partially blind mom, Nazife.
Hatidze: What will happen to me? What am I supposed to do when you’re dead and gone? (Long pause) Nazife: Get married … ?
There Goes the Neighborhood
After establishing Hatidze’s story and showcasing her antediluvian methodology of beekeeping, with its natural stone and tree hives, its use of a puffing mini bellows filled with goat dung powder (to subdue swarming bee aggression), and her mesmerizing chanting of rhythmic, folksy bee-cantations, where you can literally feel the hypnotic power with which it commands bees—along come the Sams.
The Sams are a nomadic family. They move in with their seven children and slightly despotic (and hugely inept) patriarch, hauling with them a one-family trailer park and many cows. And when he finds out what Hatidze does for a living, Mr. Hussein Sam starts thinking that maybe he’ll also affiliate himself with some of the apparent apiary abundance.
At first, Hatidze welcomes the company, playing with the younger children, who are, for the most part, fairly latchkey given their dad’s level of disorganization.
Hatidze is happy to teach Hussein about beekeeping, repeating over and over again that one must take only half of each hive’s honey and leave the other half for the bees.
But Hussein Sam is primarily a survivalist—a self-centered, klutzy opportunist, with nine mouths to feed—and doesn’t heed Hatidze’s admonitions about balance.
There’s a scene of him and his supervisor (basically his honey-pimp) chain-sawing apart one of Hatidze’s meticulously tended-to hives, which is housed in a dead tree bridging a small creek. They greedily munch on the pilfered honeycomb like it’s watermelon, and steal all of it.
Ultimately, Hussein’s all about getting while the getting’s good, and sure enough, his bee swarms get too close to hers (swarms are territorial) and end up killing hers.
Flailing Survival Versus Balanced Harmony
Life on earth is about honoring the laws of harmony that lead to well-being, abundance, and flow. The recent farming documentary “The Biggest Little Farm” proved this in spades.
But “Honeyland” is not a fictional story about a good woman and an evil man; Hussein Sam’s a desperate man—nine mouths to feed is a massive weight of responsibility. His family needs all the money that his Johnny-come-lately attempt to sell honey can bring him, and they needed it yesterday.
And while “Honeyland” is not an in-your-face, “Fracking-is-horrible!” type of eco-doc, it carries the same message. Yes, absolutely, drilling and pumping deadly chemicals hundreds of feet down into shale and ruining the groundwater will sure enough unbalance the environment.
But in this case, all you need to do is get greedy, let your bees get too close to someone else’s bees, cause bee genocide, and we know what happens when all the bees die.
It could also be argued, in favor of balance, that if you live in the remote outback, maybe you should think twice about the wisdom of trying to raise seven kids.
Doesn’t Seem Like a Documentary
The directors of ‘Honeyland,” Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, were commissioned by The Nature Conservation Project (NCP) to create an environmental video in Macedonia.Stefanov went to research the region and found out that there were some old, traditional wild beekeepers still there. They shot over 400 hours of footage, over the course of three years, with the dramaturgy always clear from the start: They wanted to tell a story about about ecological peril, via this particular wild beekeeper.
Then when the Sam family showed up, it became more about the conflict between them and Hatidze, and how that affects the balance of the land—and the directors had their ready-made, serendipitous nemesis.
