Review of Honeyland

Ruth liked this more than I did...I found it hard to like, though much to appreciate. It's about honey producers in Macedonia - one oldish woman (living with her much-older mother) who produces honey through a combination of wild gathering and a few semi-natural hives, and one family of micro-scale commercial producers, who know almost nothing about bees or honey (or cattle farming, their other main activity). Despite the poster this is not a depiction of any rural idyll - they are a few miles from Skopje, but it's poor and harsh in a nasty way.

The family is a personal, social, cultural and agricultural disaster zone - their children suffer from bee stings, cow kicks, each other, abuse and neglect. Although they are barely part of the commercial nexus (they sell their honey to a small-scale dealer for cash) they have absolutely no feel for sustainabilty...not just in environmental terms, but in terms of planning for any kind of crop next year. They lose fifty calves because the husband has delegated feeding them to his wife, who has delegated it to the children, who just don't. Naturally their slash-and-burn methods devastate the production of their old woman neighbour, who has told them all she knows about honey production - I was going to say 'taught them all she knows', but she has taught them nothing.

Oh, and it's all actual 'found footage', in that the camera crew apparently went there and filmed without understanding Macedonian or knowing what was going on. Which means all that the brutal and incompetent and harsh scenes really happened, and no-one did anything different because they were being filmed.

It's beautifully filmed, but it's not beautiful. The landscape is harsh, the woman is ugly, the dwellings are impoverished but without the beauty that sometimes comes from simplicity. The music is amazing, but sometimes it's almost like atonal noise, so that it seems to be pure emotion rather than anything like a tune.

Watched at Lansdown Hall through Stroud Film Club.