Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov, <em>Honeyland</em>, North Macedonia, 2019, 87’
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3941
Recensione di Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov, Honeyland, North Macedonia, 2019, 87’.
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Greca N. Meloni
Anuac
Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov, <em>Honeyland</em>, North Macedonia, 2019, 87’
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
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2019-12-29
2019-12-13
2019-12-29
2019-12-29
313-315
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Greca N. Meloni
2019/12/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3941
313
University of Vienna, Austria
2239-625X
2
en
315
Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov, <em>Honeyland</em>, North Macedonia, 2019, 87’
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/3941/3574
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                                      2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 313-315




                                                                               VIDEO
Tamara KOTEVSKA, Ljubomir STEFANOV | Honeyland, North Macedonia,
2019, 87ʼ.


   In the past decade, the increasing number of episodes of apparently
inexplicable bee losses in the US and EU has gradually led bees to take on the
role of the symbol of the worldwide ecological crisis. As Lisa J. Moore and
Mary Kosut (Buzz: Urban beekeeping and the power of the bee, 2013) pointed
out, the fear for bee’s survival linked with the concern for maintaining the
current food regime and lifestyles have brought beekeeping at the center of
the “eco-political” discourse. Bees are everywhere now, and beekeeping has
become a very popular practice, gaining a lot of attention in media, politics,
as well as in the academic context.
   Honeyland (2019), the multi-awarded film directed by Tamara Kotevska
and Ljubomir Stefanov, it’s part of the ever more increasing number of
fiction movies and documentaries dedicated to this topic. This impressive
documentary offers the opportunity to reflect on the representation of
cultural diversity produced within the context of the relationship between
human and non-human beings.
   The film opens in an extreme wide shot of a dry landscape where a solitary
human wearing a yellow shirt is walking in a dirt-road. The epic notes that
follow through the scene, seem to magnify the bewildering feeling of a
human immersed in an overwhelming nature. On the next framing, a wide
shot reveals the identity of the person that will lead us through her life-
story: Hatidze Muratova, a woman in her mid-fifties.
   We follow her steps moving along a rustic territory and climbing steep
loess cliffs. A buzzing murmur on a close-up forewarns the reason for her
journey in this arduous place. She came to collect a swarm to fill one of her
empty hives. The way she attentively moves her hands to remove the rock
slab for opening the small recess where the honeybee colony is nested
proves her skills and expert know-how in beekeeping. With her bare hands
and using only a knife, she carefully removes the honeycombs and locates


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Greca N. Meloni
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 313-315.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3941
314                                       TAMARA KOTEVSKA, LJUBOMIR STEFANOV | HONEYLAND


them inside an empty woven skep that she has brought with her. After she
collects the rest of the bees with the top of a cut plastic bottle and pours
them next to the woven skep, she finally wraps the hive in a cloth and moves
back home. Hatidze seems to practice a form of “rock beekeeping” reported
by Eva Crane (The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting, 1999) in
Macedonia and for the Balkan area where local beekeepers used recesses as
bait hives to attract swarms for their apiaries.
   The movie aims at offering an intimate gaze on the everyday life of
Hatidze. A woman who lives alone with her ill elderly mother, in an isolated
village located in a mountain region in the Balkans, 20 km away from Skopje,
without roads, electricity and running water. As the story unfolds, the viewer
learns to share with Hatidze her little moments of joy as well as to face the
challenges of a life at the mercy of what nature provides. We participate in
Hatidze’s excitement for the opportunity of sharing her expertise in
beekeeping and local knowledge with the members of a family of nomadic
cattle herders that settles in her village. As they become friends, sooner the
patriarch Hussein develops an interest in beekeeping, sensing the
opportunity to provide new incomes to take care of his seven children.
Notwithstanding the attempt of Hatidze to help them with honest and expert
advice, the different ways of living with “nature” rapidly barge into the two
families, creating strong tensions and ruining the peaceful relationship they
established before. Hussein’s craving for land and profit strongly interferes
with Hatidze’s mean of living and seems to trigger in her a profound fear and
sense of discomfort for her future. The tensions burst into the story when
Hatidze finds thousands of her bees laying on the bottom of the wall hives
and accuses Hussein to be responsible for their death. Eventually, after a few
episodes that show the ambiguous reactions of the members of Hussein’s
family towards the death of their animals, they decide to move from the
village in search of a better place, leaving Hatidze to face another winter
alone with her mother.
   The impressive photography contributes to strengthening the powerful
narrative structure of the film. The masterful use of natural light confers a
lively mixture of realism and graveness that, in the contrasting shades,
seems to revoke the masterpieces in Caravaggian style. The astonishing
beauty of the movie combined with a certain intimacy through which the
narrative is constructed could be the reason for its popularity. However, the
film seems imbued with a form of environmentalism typical of “western”
ontology connected with the strong opposition between nature and culture.
As we learn from the synopsis, the directors intended to offer “a tough and



2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 313-315
TAMARA KOTEVSKA, LJUBOMIR STEFANOV | HONEYLAND                                     315


tender portrait of the delicate balance between humankind and nature”. It is
precisely in the different relationships that Hatidze and Hussein establish
with the bees that we can detect the traces of this implicit ontology.
   In the movie, Hatidze takes on the role of a symbol of a “sustainable”
lifestyle in harmony with the rules of “nature”, while Hussein’ inclination to
a more capitalistic form of exploitation of animals seems to stand for an
alleged loss of humankind to live in harmony with nature.
   Furthermore, the gender opposition conveys the representation of the
association between woman/nature as opposed to men/culture, contributing
to offering another level of meaning to the relationship between Hatidze and
Hussein. Indeed, rather than “tried-and-true beekeeping advice”, Hatidze
offers to Hussein her expertise and technical knowledge on beekeeping. In
taking half of the honey for herself and leave the rest to the bees, Hatidze
shows to master a profound knowledge of the functioning of the colony as a
superorganism. That is, she knows that harvesting all the honey without
leaving any stockpile, would lead to the collapse of the colony. In this regard,
the death of Hussein’s bees cannot be merely seen as the consequence of a
“natural imbalance”, it should be considered instead of the result of
inexperience and unfamiliarity with the world of the bees.
   Thus, the contrasting relationship between Hatidze and Hussein should
be read as a relationship between a master and a novice rather than two
symbol-figures of the dichotomy between nature and culture. In this regard,
the amazing images that portray Hatidze surrounded by thousands of
buzzing bees, intent in singing a song to convince the insects to enter inside
the woven skep she is holding, risk to offer an exotic gaze on the life of a
woman depicted as “the last in a long line of Macedonian wild beekeepers”.
   To conclude, notwithstanding the compelling story, a thick ethnographic
research would have prevented the risk, implicit in the movie, to convey
forms of exotic environmentalism connected to the myth of the bon sauvage.


                                                                 Greca N. MELONI
                                                               University of Vienna
                                                 greca.nathascia.meloni@univie.ac.at




                                     2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2019: 313-315
