Honeyland (2019) The risk with any documentary is that no one ever knows what story will emerge. It took real fortitude for directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov to make the journey to this remote village of Bekirlija, in Macedonia. There they discovered Hatidže Muratova, an elderly beekeeper, and spent three years exploring her life when neighbors move next door to her and begin disrupting the ecological system of traditional beekeeping. Hatidže Muratova is one of the most remarkable women ever to appear on film, and to witness her irascible determination to survive in this desolate landscape provides one of the very best studies of how to maintain a harmonious balance with nature – and with the economic forces of irritating neighbors.
Inside each bee are barrels of buzz
Scooped from rare buds to rarer buds
Embedded to engender cellular hives
Clones of kamikaze drones with knives
Alive within a medieval bureaucracy
Following a zen noir philosophy
Inherited from some Ancien Régime
Where pyramid schemes nourish one Queen
That Queen of tambourines beats bees from her heart
To keep both hemispheres from streaming apart
Or redress the blunder of colonial plunder
That tribalized neighbors into rival warriors
And by buzz alone She governs the nation
For a Queen can move in any direction
So long as She reigns with noblesse oblige
And leaves enough honey for all the bees
[Disposable Poem March 8, 2021]
Dr. Mike
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