The Complicated, Triumphant Woman at the Heart of the Film “Honeyland”

It was nominated for two Oscars, and some critics are calling it the best film of the past year.

Hatidze Muratova, the protagonist of "Honeyland."Ljubo Stefanov

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Honeyland, an Oscar contender for both best documentary feature and best international feature, may first appear to be concerned with wild beekeeping in the small, landlocked Republic of North Macedonia. And bees do fill the film—flitting in and out of the frame, stinging hapless neighbors, and alchemizing the harsh landscape into molten gold. But the documentary doesn’t teach us much about cultivating honey. At its heart, this film is a character study, a meditation on the life of a woman who has carved out a precarious existence in an unforgiving place.

When we first meet Hatidze, she is ascending the path from the rustic homestead she shares with her dying mother and her dog, Jackie, in search of wild bees in the surrounding hills. She has survived for more than 50 years in the ruins of an abandoned village with no electricity or indoor plumbing, eking out her existence by journeying to the closest city to trade the honey for medicine and fruit. And by all accounts, she is quite happy, according to filmmakers Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov.

When the filmmakers first met her, she was singing, Kotevska recalled when I interviewed her and Stefanov last week. “Every time she has a new person coming to her door, she starts singing to them to break the ice.” She also sings to the bees, a technique that appears to quell their stings.

The arrival of a nomadic family—trailer, shabby cattle, kittens, and a litter of children in tow—shatters Hatidze’s serene world, and that tension sets the dramatic stakes of the film. Her new neighbors don’t share her philosophy of taking only what’s needed from the bees. Their avarice, and the events that soon unfold, have led many critics to praise the film as an allegory for the modern world’s impact on our most fragile ecosystems.

But there’s another dimension to Hatidze’s story that, for me, elevates the film above a simple fable about human greed. The death of Hatidze’s two sisters has tasked her with caring for her dying mother alone. Their conversations, which take place in the dark, cave-like interior of their home, are often quite funny—the daily bickering of two aging women. But they also contain poignant revelations of Hatidze’s inner yearnings. “When matchmakers were coming, you didn’t accept any?” she asks her mother. “When they were asking for my hand?”

Hatidze seems to wonder about the paths her life might have taken. “If I’d had a son like you,” she later tells one of the neighbor boys, “things would be different.”

“You can see how unjust life was to her, because she’s the greatest extrovert and artist you’ll ever meet, and yet she’s trapped all her life in this abandoned area, and given the burden to take care of her mother,” Kotevska said.

The filmmakers spent three years with Hatidze. I wondered why someone would agree to bare herself on camera this way. But Kotevska says that there was never any need for negotiation; from the first time she encountered the filmmakers, Hatidze wanted to get her story out to the world. As Kotevska put it, “this was her way of liberation.”

Ljubo Stefanov
Samir Ljuma

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate