It's interesting to see this get two nominations. Usually, documentaries are pretty much just kept in their place.Hatidze is a bee-keeper in North Macedonia. She lives with her invalid mother in the remains of a bombed out village. Her hives are meticulously cared for in the old traditions and she makes enough from selling the honey to provide for herself and her mother. Then a migrant family moves in next door and Hatidze's peaceful existence is shattered. The family is loud, their livestock are unruly, and the parents have little to no inclination to actually raise their children short of how they can provide money. At first, Hatidze is happy to help them set up their own hives, painstakingly demonstrating how to care for the bees and warning about over-harvesting the honey. But the dad, Hussein, is really only concerned with making as much money as he can, and the hives soon collapse. Hatidze must venture out into the countryside to look for a new wild bee colony in replacement.
This documentary is very slow with no helpful context about bee-keeping, the socioeconomic factors, or the history of North Macedonia. Still, Hatizde is a warm, likeable subject and if all the documentary did was follow her around while she worked with her bees, I would have liked it just fine. The neighbors are a different fucking story all together. I'm not going to bag on people who are poor and clearly had no access to education. That doesn't help anyone. I am, however, going to die angry about people who can only see a better way forward for themselves at someone else's expense.
I don't know that this documentary is as accessible as some others in recent years but at least nobody's getting shot or blown up or turned into a terrorist, so there's that. It's currently streaming on Hulu.
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