Movie Review: Give Bees a Chance in the Excellent "Honeyland"

A golden documentary.

What if I told you that one of the year's most thrilling, compelling, captivating movies was a documentary about warring North Macedonian beekeepers?

It's not an easy sell, I get it.

And yet, Honeyland is precisely that: thrilling, compelling and captivating. Slap that quote on the poster, note its two Oscar nominations (a groundbreaker for being the first nommed for both Best International Feature and Best Documentary), and you're still probably gonna struggle to get people through the door. So, forgive me if the hyperbole here sounds over the top, but I'm trying to stress that Honeyland is a stirring demonstration of our symbiosis with the natural world. Or, in other words, it’s tight.

Shot over three years in the mountainous region of North Macedonia, filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov found a great, singular subject in Hatidže Muratova, an older woman who cares for her elderly mother and keeps hives of bees far away from anything remotely resembling a city. After decades of working with her buzzing colleagues, she knows to leave half the honey for them, and take the rest to the market for sale. It's a careful balance that gives her and her mother enough to live on, and keep the bees productive and happy (happy enough to keep making honey, anyway).

Conflict arrives when a family of farmers move in next door. Soon, the careful balance is tipped off its axis. They see the success Hatidže has with her bees, and decide to install hives of their own. The thing is, they overcommit, promising a skeevy merchant more honey than the bees can create, having been tempted by his huge payday. They take more and more from the bees, sending the area's fragile ecosystem into a tailspin. And whether it's cosmic karma, or Mother Nature enacting her revenge, the suffering expands well beyond simply the bees, affecting other species in the region too.

The inherent drama of this compact tale, not to mention the on-the-nose environmental parable, is enough to make Honeyland feel contrived. I mean it as a compliment: here's a documentary that couldn't have been scripted better. We shouldn't always celebrate docos for feeling like Hollywood movies, but in this instance, I'm just trying to applaud the directors for crafting a powerful story with clear lessons from their bounty of footage. It likely helps that, by sticking around for nearly half a decade, they earned the trust of the subjects enough to be totally ignored, gifting viewers with vicious fights that feel stolen by hidden cameras, despite them being immersed within the chaos.

Beautifully photographed, and with some serious take-home considerations about how much we use up (and give back to) the Earth, Honeyland is good enough to potentially convert Nicolas Cage into a fan. If you’ve ever seen The Wicker Man, you’ll know that’s high praise indeed.

4.5/5

Honeyland arrives in Australian cinemas 5 March 2020. Rated M for coarse language.