Macedonia’s Oscar© 2019 Entry for Best International Feature ‘Honeyland’
‘Honeyland’ a Documentary from Macedonia
How this movie came to be made is as amazing as the film itself. The main character is a woman whose life is a truly beautiful and sad story…how the ecological balance of her existence, the bees’ existence, the nomads’ existence on the land were exposed to us, total foreigners, was an act of hospitality in itself. The movie should be submitted to the Academy by Macedonia for Best International Feature Nomination. It could very well win, which would be a first for Macedonia.
Watch the trailer here. In theaters July 26, 2019
We first see a lone figure walking in a large empty landscape and as we see the face, as craggy as the mountains surrounding the land, we cannot tell if it is a man or a woman, young or old but we gradually realize it is a woman, about the most unusual looking woman we have ever seen. We feel like we are in an ancient time but no, neither is she ugly nor are we in ancient times. She travels to the city bazaar from her home in a ruined village to sell the honey and where she buys hair dye and is given a beautiful peacock fan for her mother. As we get to know her, her inner beauty and her lack of any artifice, her joy with what life offers and her acceptance of her singular life, caring for an infirm mother with pleasure, all these transform her into a beautiful woman with the same desires to look her best and to have a thought for love of a man as any woman in the world has ever had.
Hatidze Muratova is a Macedonian beekeeper of Turkish ethnicity: Outside, she sings to the bees that she tends with an expert, traditional hand. Inside, she spoons their honey into the mouth of her 85 year-old mother, a living testament to the power of the elixir her daughter cultivates. (Read more at The New Republic, Josephine Livingstone)
“Take half and leave half” repeats our protagonist time and again as if in a prayer of thanks to the environment which has given her access to some of the best honey in the land and as instructions to her newly installed nomad neighbor as she teaches him to harvest the honey for his and his family’s existence. When, he, out of greed, breaks Honeyland’s basic rule (take half of the honey, but leave half to the bees); she, the last female beehunter in Europe, is left to save the bees and restore natural balance.
Honeyland has no voiceover. We see the world though Hatidze’s eyes and the subtle machinations of her expressions.
Hussein and Ljutvie, the nomad couple with a huge brood of children, simply arrive one day on the mountain with a trailer full of rough-and-tumble little boys and a bunch of chickens. It’s immediately clear by how he relates to Hatidze that he is out to serve himself first and sees the world in a different way from Hatidze.
Hatidze loves the little children, and one infant girl goes home with her to visit her mother and she gives her a kitten. Together, Hatidze and the kids fiddle with an old radio and play on the swings. She teaches the babies letters by drawing them in the dirt with a stick.
At the screening I attended at Neuehouse, I asked the filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov how they found Hatidze. Tamara said that they were on an assignment to investigate how the rerouting of the river had changed and landscape, leaving the villages further abandoned. After World War II, Macedonia and Turkey exchanged citizens to the countries of their nationalities, and the Turkish population largely left Macedonia. But Natidze and her mother remained and at the time of shooting they were the only people living among the gray stone houses surrounded by a gray stone wall. Natidze invited Tamara to make a movie about her. She said she had dreamed of someone shooting her as she walked in the plains. Another high point for her was that she was shown her dying her hair.
Tamara herself finished primary school in Skopje. In her third year of high school, she got a scholarship for studying abroad in Tennessee, USA, for one year. In 2012 she started studying at the faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje. In 2015, she participated in Sarajevo Film Festival’s Talent Campus. In 2016, her script for Stuffed Life won the scholarship promoted by MIDPOINT Central European Script Center at the Eastweek Scriptwriting Workshop for New Talents at the Trieste Film Festival.
In July of this year Tamara signed with UTA as the narrative docu she co-directed with Ljubomir Stefanov hit theaters this past weekend via Neon, who acquired it after Sundance. It grossed an estimated $30,000 over the three-day frame in two theaters to begin its rollout and currently is at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Cineuropa’s interview by Vittoria Scarpa is reproduced here:
10/05/2019 — Macedonia’s Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, who are visiting the 4th Nuoro Is Real Festival, spoke to us about their documentary Honeyland which triumphed at Sundance.
Cineuropa: Your film was very warmly received by the audience in Nuoro. Generally speaking, do you find that people are more receptive to environmental topics at this particular moment in time?
Tamara Kotevska: I think the film was well-suited to the concept of this festival. When the director Alessandro Stellino explained to us that the festival takes place in just one setting because people in the area like it that way, I thought: that’s the fundamental principle of our film! Why do more and risk disrupting the equilibrium? Here, people have exactly what they need. The film is an honest mirror of how we live and the mistakes we make.
Ljubomir Stefanov: This film is a very moving, human story, but it also carries an important environmental message. We read so many things about the environment, especially online. It shocks you, but you immediately move on to something else. The message in our film is strong and clear because it’s symbolic. It can be reduced to one word: greed. We are making excessive use of natural resources; the principle of fair and equitable sharing is fundamental.
How did this three-year adventure with the film’s protagonist, Hatidze, begin?
TK: When we met this woman, it changed all our plans. Initially, we were supposed to make a short documentary in the Bregalnica river region. This particular river is interesting because it changes its natural course every ten years or so, and the villages around it move accordingly. We made contact with various farmers, but when we met Hatidze we decided to stay with her, because it was important to us that her story was told. Her story is also the story of a life lived according to one of the traditions of this Turkish minority, living in Macedonia: the last daughter is expected to take care of her parents; she can’t marry and have a family of her own while her parents are still living.
You filmed moments of great intimacy between the mother and her daughter. Did you ever wonder whether you should turn the camera off, such as when the mother died, for example?
TK: We couldn’t predict her mother was going to die, but we knew that it would be the logical conclusion to this story in that particular village, because from that moment on, Hatidze’s life would change dramatically. It turned out that it happened during filming. It’s the end of an era. We don’t show where Hatidze goes afterwards, but we know that she’s finally free to live her life.
LS: We spent a lot of time with them; we covered all of their daily life. The film includes six or seven scenes between the mother and daughter, but we had over 25 and they were all very powerful. We were a small team: two directors, two directors of photography, one editor and one sound engineer. We slept in tents, we ate all together, along with Hatidze: we were a very united group.
The film is an observational documentary, but it’s also very lively. At times, it feels like a fiction film, especially when the other family arrives in the village. How did you achieve this?
TK: From the very beginning, we wanted the story to feel like fiction, even if it wasn’t. In our minds, the line between documentary and fiction should disappear, a good story is a good story. I was more focused on the people, Ljubomir on the environmental issues. We were always interested in maintaining a perfect balance between the human story and the environmental side. We didn’t want to make a stereotypical documentary with a narrating voice, with interviews etc. We committed to carry on filming until we were sure we had the right amount of material to develop the dramaturgical aspects of the story.
How does Hatidze live today? You bought her a house with the prizemoney you won at the Sarajevo FF — is that right?
LS: As a rule, documentary protagonists aren’t paid. But when someone opens up their life to you, you have to give something back; it’s the least you can do.
TK: We spoke a lot about what we could do for her, so we helped her go back to the village where her other relations live. But she says human relationships are the biggest reward to have come out of all this. There’s a journalist in London who saw the film; he was struck by her story and flew to Macedonia to talk to her. Hatidze loves to be among people. She’s suffered from loneliness a lot in her life and now she sees us all as one big family.
(Translated from Italian)
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In Park City, Honeyland won Sundance’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary, the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for cinematography, and the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for originality.
International sales agent Deckert has sold film to Neon for U.S., Contact for Benelux and KJ Films for China. Look for it in theaters NOW!
