Honeyland

Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska's Honeyland (Медена земја) won three jury prizes at Sundance 2019 — the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, the World Cinema Cinematography Award, and the Special Jury Award for Originality. The film became the first documentary in Academy Awards history to be nominated simultaneously for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film, the latter as North Macedonia's official submission. The directors had spent over three years filming the central subject in a remote Macedonian village.

In a remote village called Bekirlija in the Lozovo region of North Macedonia — without paved roads, without electricity, half-deserted by depopulation — the last wild beekeeper in Europe, Hatidže Muratova, tends to her hives in the surrounding mountains and her bedridden mother in the family's small stone house. The film follows the rhythms of her solitary daily work — finding wild bee colonies in cliff-face honeycombs, harvesting only half the honey to leave the bees with enough to survive — until the arrival of a new neighbouring family with a herd of cattle disrupts the fragile ecological balance Hatidže had maintained.

The directors' commitment to long static observation, the absence of voice-over narration or interview-talking-heads, and the central subject's remarkable presence on camera produced one of the most distinctive documentaries of recent decades. Hatidže's continuing post-film life has been documented by international press; the proceeds from the film's distribution have substantially supported her and her village.