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. It was the first documentary in Academy Awards history to be nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film, the latter as North Macedonia's official submission. The directors spent over three years filming their subject in a remote Macedonian village.

The village is Bekirlija, in the Lozovo region of North Macedonia: no paved roads, no electricity, half-emptied by depopulation. Here the last wild beekeeper in Europe, Hatidže Muratova, tends to her hives in the surrounding mountains and to her bedridden mother in the family's small stone house. The film follows the rhythm of her solitary daily work, finding wild colonies in cliff-face honeycombs and harvesting only half the honey so the bees keep enough to survive, until a new family arrives next door with a herd of cattle and unsettles the fragile ecological balance Hatidže has maintained.

The directors hold to long, static observation, with no voice-over narration and no talking heads, and Hatidže's presence on camera is remarkable. Together those make it one of the most distinctive documentaries of recent decades. International press has followed her life since the film, and the proceeds from its distribution have given substantial support to her and to her village.