2. Macedonia — Honeyland
2019, directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov
Honeyland is a compelling documentary and an ecological fable for modern life. The subject is a wiry, lonely woman named Hatidze, who etches out a meager, subsistent existence keeping wild bees and selling their honey. She and her 85-year-old, bedridden mother are the only inhabitants left in a rural village without electricity or indoor plumbing. Soon an unruly large family of nomadic ranchers move into the village, and the new neighbors begin to disrupt her quiet life and precarious livelihood. Chaos, pathos, and human comedy ensue.
There is sharp contrast between Hatidze and the new family led by an ambitious, but clueless patriarch. She is ecologically-conscious, sustainable in her beekeeping trade, and lives a life in balance and harmony with the natural world. He is greedy, wanton, and seeks to extract as much as he can from the earth, in pursuit of rising above the family’s dire poverty and miserable conditions. Seeing Hatidze’s profitable honey sales, the patriarch, ever the capitalist, jumps headlong into the honey game. As he and his children get stung over and over, he’s clearly in over his head, likely not for the first time. Hatidze teaches him to take only half the honey and leave half for the bees, a sustainable beekeeping practice. But when his boss pressures him to meet business demands for honey, the man sells his entire stock, and his colonies attack Hatidze’s bees, thus ruining her honey and her livelihood. Of course, he is indignant and tries to shift blame.
It is easy to view the patriarch as the villain of the story; he is certainly the foil to Hatidze. It is also unfortunately easy to laugh at his folly, especially when his actions and choices are so absurd and destined for failure, as if they were written for a slapstick comedy. But, as critics like A.O. Scott have noted, this man is a victim of his circumstances as well. Economic pressures from his employer and societal expectations to provide a decent living for his family drive him to make bad decisions, even when sometimes he has second thoughts. Eventually, I pitied him and his family, thinking about the desperation and despair surrounding their seven young children, who live destitute in a ramshackle RV.
Apparently, these themes and the central conflict fell by accident onto the filmmakers’ laps. They were initially going to make a documentary about the rural region, until they found Hatidze’s story more interesting. Then, the nomadic family happened to move into town. The documentary is done in the fly-on-wall style, which I greatly prefer to the talking-heads variety. What is also impressive is that the filmmakers compressed over 400 hours of footage into a 90 minute film that feels neither hurried nor boring. These facts are extra-textual, but there is much to appreciate on the screen without additional background information. The filmmakers make daring use of quick cuts into the middle of action, jumping between disparate scenes and shifts in time. The cuts are jarring and cause initial confusion and disorientation before you realize what’s actually happening in a scene. For example, in a jump cut, it’s nighttime and Hatidze is running around with a torch howling at unknown creatures, followed by a shaky camera. Soon you realize she’s chasing away wolves or some wild animal from the village.
What does it say about Macedonia? On its surface, maybe not much. We see one train trip Hatidze takes into the capital city Skopje to sell her honey. She looks quite out of place in the modern world, but the divide between rural and urban is present in most countries of the world, including mine. In small talk she makes with a vendor, she asks their ethnicity (Bosnian) and she reveals she is a Turk (the nomadic family are Turks as well). The conversation reminds us that the ethnic distinctions and divisions that led to war and the creation of what are now the Balkan countries still matter in modern Macedonia, even if it stays below the surface. In another sequence, a boy from the nomadic family takes a liking to Hatidze, runs away from his parents to her, and almost becomes a son she’s never had. He asks her why she never moved out of the village. She replies, “If I had a son like you, things would be different.” Instead, she is childless and alone, except for her dying mother, whom she care for out of a sense of duty and filial piety. The scenes of Hatidze with her mother are quite heartfelt, although some are difficult to watch. Her selfless devotion for her mother also stands in contrast to what we often see in the modern world.
I saw Honeyland on Hulu.
This is #2 in my World Tour of Cinema project. Read my introductory post here.
