Hon­ey­land

Besides the swarm of memes riff­ing on the 2007 Dream­Works ani­ma­tion Bee Movie, star­ring Jer­ry Sein­feld as a bee, our rela­tion­ship with the hum­ble insect has sel­dom been explored on screen. While the Mace­don­ian doc­u­men­tary, Hon­ey­land, is unlike­ly to ben­e­fit from that movie’s inex­plic­a­ble buzz in terms of box office suc­cess, it does prompt the view­er to con­sid­er the extent to which the lit­tle crit­ters deserve our empa­thy. It is a reflec­tion on the rela­tion­ship between woman and nature, and it even runs with the Bee Movie dic­tum that bees can fly because ​“bees don’t care what humans think”.

We meet Hatidze Mura­to­va, a tire­less Turk who lives in a derelict vil­lage, as she climbs a moun­tain to uncov­er hon­ey­comb from beneath the rocks. It is an evoca­tive cel­e­bra­tion of nature – the cam­era lingers from a dis­tance as she cross­es the sun-soaked hori­zon, the screen awash with amber hues. She lives on the nat­ur­al boun­ty of the earth, enjoy­ing what the film sug­gests is an idyl­lic rur­al life away from the bustling mar­kets where she flogs her produce.

The prob­lem is when it comes to accept­ing her behav­iour as humane. Hatidze pulls apart the bees’ home and then bathes them in smoke. Hon­ey­land ques­tions whether humans are able to form rela­tion­ships with bees, con­tribut­ing to a debate among veg­ans about their qual­i­ty of life. In 2018, the Aus­tralian doc­u­men­tary Domin­ion high­light­ed ani­mals’ human-like emo­tions through extreme close-ups of their eyes. Bees, on the oth­er hand, do not have expres­sive facial fea­tures, mak­ing it more chal­leng­ing for the view­er to empathise with the bees in the same way that it is pos­si­ble to do with Hatidze.

Mak­ing their debut fea­ture out­ing, direc­tors Ljubo Ste­fanov and Tama­ra Kotevs­ka do their utmost to get as close as they can to the bees. We watch in awe as the bees climb onto a leaf to escape drown­ing in a well of water. It is unex­pect­ed­ly mov­ing to wit­ness a bee clutch the seem­ing­ly life­less body of a fam­i­ly mem­ber. The bees seem all the more relat­able after Hatidze’s qui­et home is invad­ed by a bru­tal fam­i­ly of cowherders who exploit her trade. It’s a chal­leng­ing watch at times, and the accep­tance of cul­tur­al rel­a­tivism becomes dif­fi­cult when phys­i­cal pun­ish­ment for a child is nor­malised or a calf is stran­gled by a bad­ly tied rope.

Hatidze stands as a charm­ing coun­ter­point to all this – she adores the radio and shares her food with the local chil­dren as if she were a Mace­don­ian Maria von Trapp. We watch her dai­ly walks to see the bees, and for all the still­ness of the world, the hills tru­ly do come alive. Win­ter arrives and, hav­ing wrought their hav­oc, the cowherder inter­lop­ers up and leave. Hatidze is now alone, pon­der­ing why she nev­er mar­ried and had chil­dren of her own. It is strik­ing that these anx­i­eties have not been men­tioned before, and we part ways with a tableau of human misery.

Brief and to the point, Hon­ey­land proves more med­i­ta­tive than its premise sug­gests. The dif­fer­ences between bees and humans can, pre­vi­ous­ly explored by our friends at Dream­Works Ani­ma­tions, has now been expand­ed upon. Maybe bees don’t care what humans think, but we should cer­tain­ly learn to care for them.