PANEL DISCUSSION “WHERE DID ALL THE BUGS GO?”
SCREENING OF THE DOCUMENTARY FILM “HONEYLAND”
Special guest: Nediljko Landeka
Nediljko Landeka was born in 1967 in the town of Imotski, and has worked at the Istria County Institute of Public Health in Pula since 1995 as Head of the Disinfection, Disinsectisation and Deratisation Department. He is involved in research in the fields of ecology, prevalence, phylogeny and ethology of specific insects in Istria. During his years of research, he attended professional courses and workshops, participated in various scientific meetings, held expert lectures and published original research and review papers in specialised journals. This is how he published his article entitled “Influence of mosquito treatment on bees” in the June 2017 edition of the journal “Hrvatska pčela”.
Sensitive to nature protection, he is a frequent guest in the media, warning the public of the harmful effects of pesticides. For several years he has been practising organic olive farming and beekeeping with approximately 30 Langstroth-Root hives in the same environment.
FILM SCREENING: HONEYLAND
WRITTEN BY:
Tamara Kotevska,
Ljubomir Stefanov
CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Fejmi Daut,
Samir Ljuma
PLOT:
The story follows the life of a middle-aged woman called Hatidže, a beekeeper and honey seller from Bekirlija, an isolated mountain village in North Macedonia. While living with her sick, partly deaf and bedridden mother in the remote countryside, Hatidže keeps alive the tradition and way of life of her ancestors. They share a dilapidated old house, and Hatidže earns a living by collecting honey of the highest quality, climbing up steep cliffs and pulling honeycombs out of rock crevices, and then making several-hour-long trips to the market to sell it. Despite their hard and crude everyday life, Hatidže and her mother live in harmony with nature, which can be especially cruel during the winter months. The life of the two women takes a turn when the nomadic Turkish cow-herder Hussein and his large family move to the village, right next door to them. The lively, temperamental and noisy nomads lead a completely different way of life and hold different life values, and soon enough, Hussein horns in on the honey business in search for quick profits. Once Hatidže starts showing him the ropes of beekeeping, he starts acting carelessly towards the bees, just like he did with his cattle, that begins to perish.
At the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the film won the Grand Jury Prize, the Special Jury Award for Cinematography and the Special Jury Award for Impact for Change, and that same year it was nominated for the European Film Award for Best Documentary. In 2020, it received nominations in the categories for Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film at the Oscars. The documentary film was originally intended by its directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov as a government-funded educational project focusing on everyday life in the central region of North Macedonia, along the river Bregalnica. Honeyland was initially planned to be an observational documentary, documenting from a distance the extremely dedicated work of a honey seller and her mother as the only remaining residents in a remote mountain village. However, the directors’ plans changed on arrival of the lively nomads whose contact with the protagonist sparked a dramatic conflict, providing for a more classic narrative composition. Infused with plenty of charm and humour, the film focuses on the human relationship with nature. On one hand, a harmonious co-existence and abiding by the laws of nature, and on the other hand unscrupulous exploitation in hunt for profit. The meditative minimalism underscored by silence in the first half of the film gives way to noise and neorealism in the second half, resembling Iranian docudramas set in the countryside.
Parks von Kroatien
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