Honeyland

Honeyland (Medena zemja, 2019) is a North Macedonian documentary you can watch online on iFILM. It follows Hatidze Muratova, one of the last wild beekeepers in Europe, who lives by a single old rule.

She takes half the honeycomb and leaves the rest to the bees. Hatidze shares a stone house with no power and no road with her ailing, half-blind mother, in a village everyone else walked away from. The fragile balance cracks when a roaming family settles next door — children, cattle, and a far hungrier idea of profit. The quiet routine turns into conflict, and not one frame of it is staged.

Shot over three years, the film began as an ecology project for directors Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska and grew into a story about greed and solitude. At the Academy Awards it pulled off something no title had managed before, landing nominations for Best Documentary and Best International Feature at the same time. Slow, strikingly photographed and quietly harsh, it rewards anyone who loves observational nonfiction. Stream Honeyland (2019) online on iFILM.