Honeyland

[osprey_archer]

There are two kinds of documentary: the Woman in Motion kind, where the filmmakers go around and interview lots of people and incorporate found footage, and then there are documentaries like Honeyland, where the filmmaker goes somewhere and films for a while and then stitches a movie together out of the footage.

I tend to prefer the first kind, partly because they tend to be more fast-paced, but also because I tend to be less awkwardly aware of the filmmaker. Or rather, in the first kind of documentary the camera crew’s presence is both more obvious and less invasive: if a camera crew goes to interview George Takei for an afternoon, for instance, you don’t feel that their presence is likely to have a big warping effect on his life, because it is just an afternoon and he’s George Takei.

A camera crew that sets up shop for months and months in a remote Macedonian village, on the other hand, is going to change things. In fact, a lot of the action in Honeyland arises from a new family that settles in the village for a few months: their presence completely changes Hatidze’s life. First the changes are positive: they give her companions other than her aged, dying mother. Then, the changes turn negative: the new people set up beehives of their own, and because they don’t leave enough honey when they harvest, their bees kill Hatidze’s.

Now, obviously a film crew is not going to set up a bunch of beehives, but all the same, their presence must have had a huge effect on Hatidze’s life - but they have no presence in the film. When Hatidze’s mother dies, and Hatidze is keening over the body, and the camera is about two feet from her face, I can’t help thinking about how the camera crew is right there, filming like a pack of vultures when the human thing to do would be to set aside the camera for a minute and try to comfort her.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that they did just that after they got their clip, but all the same, the lack of acknowledgment that the film crew is there creates an absence in the film that bothers me.

This is something that I’ve experienced with other documentaries, too, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on what bothered me before, which is why poor Honeyland is bearing the brunt of my realization. If the phantom film crew doesn’t bother you, it’s doing what it’s doing very well: recording the life of a beekeeper in a remote mountain village in Macedonian (it appears to be occupied only by Hatidze and her mother until the other family arrives) as she harvests not only her own hive, but the wild hives in the mountains around her.

The beekeeping scenes are all particularly well done. The documentary starts with a particularly stunning shot of Hatidze making her way along a narrow mountain ledge to harvest a hive that the bees have built up among the rocks.

Comments

[taelle]

I often think about the presence of the person with the camera when I watch travel documentaries - my favorites are when that presence is acknowledged. Like the one with a very old Japanese lady who is showing her chickens and how one just brought an egg, and she's going to eat this egg for breakfast. Look, she says to the interviewer. It's still warm! Here, hold it, see how warm it is! (he complies). And you hold it too, she says into the camera, and we see a hand extending into our view to obediently hold that egg.

[osprey_archer]

That sounds adorable! The old lady telling the interviewer to hold the egg, and the interviewer does it.

[asakiyume]

Yeah--I like this acknowledgement of the presence of the crew.

[oracne]

Maybe if we can't see the crew, we can't feel their empathy? Because they must have it, I think, to film these events with sensitivity.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think there has to be a rapport between the filmmakers and their subjects - otherwise people wouldn't be so comfortable in front of the camera, would they? And clearly the fact that many documentaries are filmed as if the filmmakers aren't there is a stylistic choice that a lot of viewers are comfortable with; it's sort of idiosyncratic that it strikes me as a weird gap.

[ancientreader]

Do you ever find out how the film crew wound up in the remote Macedonian village to begin with? It doesn't sound like the kind of place you wander into by accident (with your crew, besides) and then say to yourself "Hey, kids! Let's make a documentary!" I'm wondering whether the director is maybe a family relation of Hatidze and her mother, for example.

[osprey_archer]

The information might be on the web somewhere (the film is getting Oscar buzz, so I suspect there are interviews and things; the showing I went to was sold out), but it's not in the film anywhere.

[asakiyume]

I did a cursory search after reading your comment (because now I'm wondering, too), and I found this, in an interview with the directors:

Kotevska had already suspected she was a compelling character when Stefanov had brought back pictures of Hatidze after a scouting expedition to the region with the intention of making a film about bees’ crucial ecological role (source), so it seems as if it was the ecological thing that was the prompt, and then they found the woman.

[osprey_archer]

Thanks for linking that article. I was glad to see at the end that they had used some of the proceeds from the film to buy Hatidze a house in a nearby village where she has more family - I worried about how she would go on living in her isolated village after her mother died, because she would have been all alone out there.

[asakiyume]

Wow, I'm so sad about the new people's bees killing Hatidze's :( :( :(

And yes, I feel the exact same way about a camera crew being present in a place for a long period of time. Since it **is** a reality-warping thing, I'd prefer to have it very explicitly showcased--I'd rather *not* have the illusion that they're just an invisible presence. I'd rather have one camera swing round to show you another, so you had a sense of what it was like for Hatidze. How many people were in her face all the time, with how much equipment?

[osprey_archer]

Yes! And even if there's just one camera, so it can't exactly film itself - even just having the cameraperson and/or the director chat with Hatidze (or the main subject of any documentary), just acknowledging that they're there. It just feels weird to know that they must be such a big presence and yet they're not in the movie at all.