Honeyland

North Macedonia, USA, Switzerland 2019

Dir: Ljubomir Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska

89 mins

Cast: Hatidzhe Muratova, Nazife Muratova, Hussein Sam, Ljutvie Sam

Rating: M - Coarse language

Honeyland is an elegiac and gloriously photogenic tragedy, an environmental parable played out in striking images and stark lessons in the high desert of northern Macedonia.

Filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov utterly immersed themselves in the ruins of a village where Hatidze Muratova, a high mileage/hard miles 55 year-old farm woman shares all she surveys with a house full of cats, a hound named Jackie and her blind-in-one eye 80 something mother, Nazife.

They bill her as “the last female bee hunter in Europe,” and who are we to question that claim? They tell her story without titles, without narration or explanation, without easily giving up either the geography or even her name.

They just watch her, as do we, crawling along cliffs, raiding wild bee hives in the rocks, in hollow trees — not that there are very many trees. She calls to the bees as she sweeps them into her mud and wicker portable hives. She will take them home and use them to diversify her own colony, supplement her home hives. ...

Roger Moore, Movie Nation

Hatidze Muratova, the hero of Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s Honeyland, is believed to be the last wild female honey gatherer in Europe. A tall, slim, agile woman in her early fifties with a hawklike nose, a snaggletooth, weathered skin, and extremely kind eyes, she is not merely charismatic but a radiant being. When the filmmakers first encountered Hatidze, she and Nazife, her frail eighty-five-year-old mother, were the sole inhabitants of a centuries-old stone village in an arid region of Macedonia. She told them that she had long dreamed of someone making a movie about her method of working in harmony with the bees. She wanted it to be shown on television. Her village doesn’t have running water or electricity, though, and hence no TV. Stefanov and Kotevska were prepping for another environmental documentary when they saw some trees with strange holes in them. They were told that the holes were for the beehives that Hatidze tends to. ...

Amy Taubin, artforum.com