Land des Honigs

Fighting with your neighbors. Struggling to care for your aging parent. Plying your craft and trade in the compassionless barreling economy of scale, so different from, and destructive to, the natural economies of being human. It is the same here, there, and everywhere. When there is no social contract their is imbalance and suffering, when the natural order is defended, there is simplicity and sustainability. One of my favorites of the year. Cinema is many things, but at its most beautiful it is an empathy engine.

This movie focuses on the tiny things that can make the life beautiful. Hatidze owns close to nothing, doesn't have own family but still manages to enjoy life.

What is the reason for Hatidze to continue living? Do we humans need to have a goal that drives us throug our everyday and what when we fail achieving it?

Those are the two questions that haunt me after watching this masterpiece.

"One half for me, one half for you."

3 years. 400+ hours of footage. My 2nd viewing. Yet I am still at a loss for words at how a film like this is even possible.

It somehow manages to present a grounded narrative, a parable of rural life, and a kind environmental message, all quietly captured through observational lens and intimate scope. You will witness everything from a cow giving birth to the near-drowning of a child (which, while brief, is very difficult to watch). The editing and fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style is superb.

Do not miss.

In a microcosm you get to see what humans are doing wrong. The amount of time the filmmakers have spent with the subject of the film, shows in the level of intimacy that the camera has acquired in their lives. As if it's a pair of eyes. And not a camera. Making this a thoroughly engaging film.

The relatively modern tools Hussein uses to weigh honey only help to cement the film's clear microcosm of the tension between sustainability and industrialization; between restraint and a catastrophic lack of foresight. In that sense, watching "Honeyland" is like looking at the greatest problems of our time through a pinhole, but the film sees the situation with a clarity that gets under your skin and breaks your heart. Far from a scolding, rub-your-nose-in-it depiction of environmental havoc, this is a tender story about the chaos of abandoning the common good. By reflecting Muratova's relationship with her hives against the social contract that she's formed with her mother - and that binds Hussein to his family - Kotevska and Stefanov shine a light on what the bees have always told us: They survive by serving each other. And if they ever disappeared completely, people would only have themselves to blame.