Honeyland

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

In the mountains behind Skopje in a crumbling village Hatidze,a woman in her 50's looks after her mother in a ruined house. She survives by keeping bees.  Her hives are no more than holes in the rocky cliffs accessed by narrow paths over steep gorges and are carefully tended. Hatidze rarely wears protective clothing when she extracts the honeycombs and the bees don't sting her. She takes the honey to town where she sells it and earns enough money to keep herself and her mother in basic supplies.

This lifestyle is interrupted by the arrival in the village of a noisy Turkish family, squatters who move around into an abandoned house.  They bring with them a few cattle, but it isn't long before the head of the family decides that bee keeping would be more profitable.  Whereas Hatidze is possessed of infinite patience, the Turks are in a hurry to earn cash, and in so doing they impact on the fragile ecology of Hatidze's little world.

As fly on the wall documentaries go, Honeyland is a fine example.  There is no narration; rather sad, but the enveloping story is told in purely visual terms and the photography is outstanding.