Film Review: Honeyland

Originally published January 14, 2020

Honeyland is about a beekeeper in North Macedonia. At the documentary’s outset, she lives in an abandoned village with her mother and collects honey from wild bees in the surrounding area by hand. She then makes the trip to the city of Skopje (by train and/or foot) and sells it.

The film makes the protagonist Hatizde seem like a completely natural part of her environment. Early in the film, Hatizde is never shown without context. She’s juxtaposed against the wide-open spaces she traverses to obtain her honey or the bustling streets of Skopje, where she searches for hair dye in medium and wide shots that put the focus on everything around her.

Hatzide is portrayed as the last of a dying breed of beekeeper. Watching her interact with the world around her and her 85-year-old mother would have made an interesting enough documentary. However, the tone of the film is flipped upside down when a nomadic family of nine moves into the village.

It’s at this point that the film begins its balancing act. It introduces human interest into its nature documentary. This could have been a failure, but the film doesn’t lose sight of its gripping subjects and grounds everything in a human mindset.

The film takes a naturally empathetic towards all involved. Despite the patriarch’s terrible beekeeping, the film never truly condemns him for contributing to colony collapse. He had nine mouths to feed, instead of Hatzide’s two, and so needed a comparatively industrial operation.

Honeyland takes a while to get going. For the first hour of its run time, it seems more like a series of vignettes than a cohesive narrative. But in its last half-hour, the decisions made early on pay off as the film’s moral comes into focus: we need to take care of each other and the world.

Final score: 7.7/10