Honeyland

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🎙️ EPISODE 526: 08.05.22 This was the first one I watched after my vacation and it really worked to put things in perspective. The fucking gluttony and careless joy that is taking a week to sit at a beach and a pool then at a pool and a beach again, meanwhile old lady beekeepers with ancient mothers who look so decrepit they appear to be CGI — flies hovering 24/7, an open sore on half her face which has engulfed her eye — are struggling more each minute than I ever have in my entire stupid life. This documentary was nominated for an Oscar but it lost because it wasn't produced by Obama. Obama: movie mogul.

A swarm of nomads descend on her patch of rock and hill land vegetation. They are a dysfunctional family, the comic relief and the antagonists; at first it's not so bad, having the company — they build a makeshift satellite dish to pick up radio stations and she teaches the curious tweens about beekeeping — but they eventually kill the insects and ruin the land, not out of greed but out of desperation. It's all sadness, on every front. Towards the end with our hero fighting off an unseen jackal with a torch and burying her mother in the snow. And I have another trip I gotta go plan for now. Oh to be able to leave, if just for a little while. The radio eventually picks up a static-drenched tune, just for a second: it's "You Are So Beautiful." The final frames we see her ascend the same mountain from the opening shot. The bees have returned and that howling beast in the night she attempted to fend off is a nice, scraggly dog. And they are friends.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 525 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 527 ⫸

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Honeyland (Macedonian: Медена земја, transliterated: Medena zemja) is a 2019 Macedonian documentary film that was directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov. It portrays the life of Hatidže Muratova, a loner beekeeper of wild bees who lives in the remote mountain village of Bekirlija, and follows her lifestyle before and after neighbors move in nearby. It was released on January 28, 2019.