Honeyland by Ljubo Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska
SKOPJE: It was a challenging year for the industry in North Macedonia, as everywhere. Filming became complicated, cinemas went dark, festivals were moved and canceled.
However, the year started with one of the greatest chapters in Macedonian film history. The documentary
Honeyland / Medena zemja directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film categories at the Academy Awards. It was not only the first time when a Macedonian film got two Oscar nominations, but also the first time when a documentary was nominated at the Oscars in the two categories.
Image: Ljubomir Stefanov
The award-winning documentary ‘Honeyland’ sets out to offer a timeless environmental parable, but in the process it also explores misconceptions about the region’s culture and history.
Though the documentary
Honeyland purports to be an eighty-nine-minute celebration of its central character’s spirit and apicultural philosophy, we don’t learn much about the character’s actual life. Hatidze Muratova is middle-aged, speaks Turkish, and likes to sing. She lives in an abandoned village in Macedonia with her half-blind and bed-ridden mother, Nazife, alone but for her scrawny dog Jackie, some stray cats, and millions of bees. Some of her hives are archaic wicker cones lined up in the village’s deserted yards; others she keeps hidden throughout the rocky valley inside stone fences, tree trunks, and cliff-top crevices. She travels by foot and by train to a town where she sells her honey, buys bananas, and chats with merchants, informing one man that all the other Turks and Albanians left her village a long time ago. Though the footage for the film was gathered over the span of three years, Hatidze, like a cartoon character, wears the same clothes in nearly every shot: a green floral headscarf, a yellow blouse, and a long brown skirt. The film portrays her as a master beekeeper, a loving caretaker, and a complete anachronism.