The Truth Hurts
THROUGHOUT THE 2019 Sundance film festival, the image that stayed in my mind is of a tall, agile woman with a weather-beaten face scaling a treacherous cliffside path, with gold and green hills far below her. The woman is Hatidze Muratova, believed to be the last female wild beekeeper in Europe, and the place is a corner of the Balkans, where this vivid, resilient 50-year-old; her nearly blind, bedridden mother; their dog; and their cat live in a stone house with no running water or electricity in an otherwise deserted village.
Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska, the makers of , followed Hatidze for three years, accumulating 400 hours of footage. She was happy to have her ancient method of honey-gathering recorded for TV although her only telecommunications device is a shortwave radio. Hatidze tends the hives without gloves, calling out the bees with piercingly high cries. As they swarm around her, she reaches inside to extract the honeycombs, always leaving half for the bees to feed on during the winter. Had the film been a simple portrait of a woman whose practice is a model for fair sharing between producers (the bees) and users (the gatherers), it would have been extraordinary, won the World Documentary Grand Jury prize, and its cinematographers, Fejmi Daut and Samir Ljuma, were recognized as well for their rapturously beautiful images captured in daunting (bee-swarming) circumstances.
