Hatidze Muratova walks over a few yards of steep rocks to a narrow path up a mountain that is barely 13 inches wide and looks down on a valley hundreds of feet below. We close our eyes.
Hatidze, a painfully thin woman in her early 60s, comes this way often. Looking like a ragged Mother Theresa, she is up here in light clothing to remove a stone and open a large cave full of bees.
She will, while chanting some primeval song, take some of the combs and honey, leaving, in an ancient ritual, half for the bees.
Hatidze works without the usual beekeepers’ gloves or hood. The bees envelop her head like a buzzing cloud in a rapturous meeting, happy to see the sunlight and hear her singing.
“Honeyland,” a documentary film by documentarians Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, took more than three years to shoot in these mountains four hours above the capital city of Skopje in Macedonia, where the artists have lived and studied, coming back and forth and using a small, committed crew to capture the enchantment.

Hatidze, with her broken teeth and unbreakable spirit, is the last of thousands of years of Macedonian beekeepers, who once walked these rocky paths in the second century BC, before it became Macedonia.
Alone now with only the music of bees and the wind, interrupted occasionally by a small portable radio hooked up to a makeshift antenna, Hatidze may well be the final descendent of camp followers from centuries of war, a shaman of bees.
After these trips, she collects the honey, and once a week walks four hours down to Skopje, the bustling modern capital, where she sells her honey in the old 12th-century bazaar.
Afterwards, she strolls among men and women in business suits, holding baskets and briefcases, chatting on cellphones. Here, with her meager profit, she buys a few bananas and vegetables to take back to the mountain.
We are in “Honeyland,” an amazing story, beautifully filmed, of one human’s perseverance, strength and survival.
Hatidze has dwelled since childhood in these mountains, now caring for her half-blind and paralyzed mother, in a patched-together hut, without electricity or running water.
In this small living space, little more than a dark cave warmed by a tiny stove and oil lamps, the house is a patchwork of discarded tarpaper and boards. There are a dog and kittens here, dependent, as is her mother, on Hatidze’s quiet voice and gentle touch.
One day, the 21st-century comes punching in like a grubby fist. As Hatidze watches from her porch, a family of nine rattle in with a noisy oil-stained camper and trailer full of equipment, and a small herd of cattle.
Soon the cattle and a scattering of chickens, left unattended to, begin to fall ill and die.
The father, Hussein, a grubby grifter from away, smells a different living and slowly takes to poaching Hatidze’s honey sources, disrupting the natural harmony and spiritual pulse.
Hussein sets up a clumsy patch of his own hives, and over harvests the honey to increase his sales to his own contacts.
When he fails even with that, he packs up and moves on, having destroyed the fragile balance of nature Hatidze had so carefully embraced. His rogue bees, left on their own, attack Hatidze’s hives and destroy them.
“Honeyland” gradually ceases to be just a sweet documentary about survival and a strong independent woman and her romance with bees and history, and becomes a stark, grim prophecy.
The final scenes, filmed on a winter’s afternoon, show our heroine hobbling away on a snowy field, having done battle with the future.

MOVIE INFO

“Honeyland”

Documentary, drama

The last female beehunter in Europe must save the bees and return the natural balance in Honeyland, when a family of nomadic beekeepers invade her land and threaten her livelihood. 

Length: 97 minutes
Directors: Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov
Stars: Hatidze Muratova, Nazife Muratova, Hussein Sam

It’s clear that Stefanov and Kotevska are trying to tell us that if melting icebergs, the destruction of the ozone layer and the raging fires of the rainforest are too large for us to compute, then, to truly understand survival, we should go into our gardens and consider the bee.

J.P.  Devine, of Waterville, is a former stage and screen actor.