Honeyland

I'm still fairly new to documentaries, but I feel very eager to discover more fantastic ones. In the last year, I've been powerfully moved by Minding the Gap, Dick Johnson is Dead, The Painter and the Thief, Cameraperson, and more. But Honeyland was one I couldn't connect with, despite trying.

It's a problem with the content: The film has a variety of interesting threads it could pull on but ends up leaving alone. How did Hatidzhe get into beekeeping, and how does her practice differ from less traditional methods? What happened to her village, and what led her to stay and live among the ruins? These are gestured at only to be dropped and the focus to turn more fully to her new, noisy, destructive neighbors.

But it's also a problem with the form. Being a documentary novice, I don't have any ability to say what form a documentary should take. But the choices made here were uncompelling. The directing is hands off to the point of being distracting. In the other films I mention above, there's at least some acknowledgment of the act of filmmaking, and this allows the directors to more fully engage their subjects—ask questions, seek more details, get at motive and intention and purpose and belief. Honeyland is depicted so dryly, it almost seems as if those things are fully absent, which I know they aren't.

Honeyland is a particularly frustrating film because it should be good—there's a lot of depth and dignity in the lives of these people, but the film never seems to take a single step toward it.