Honeyland(2019)
dir. Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov
The last wild beekeeper meets the market.
Where to watch: Free with ads on Tubi; Kanopy (JustWatch lists it as leaving soon); rent $3.99 on Amazon, Apple TV and Fandango At Home (JustWatch US, Oct 28 2026)Letterboxd ↗
Hatidze is one of the last wild beekeepers in North Macedonia. She lives in a village with no electricity and her sick mother, and takes only half of each hive's honey, always leaving the rest for the bees. Then a noisy nomadic family moves in next door and begins keeping bees for profit. It was shot over three years and was nominated for two Oscars.
Why it’s here
The film shows the logic of extraction without a single lecture: one person takes half and the market takes all. What's punk is the quiet refusal of the system that rewards the quick take. What's pedagogical is that it lets a viewer watch a tragedy of the commons unfold, which is hard to teach any other way. It sits beside Braiding Sweetgrass and The Overstory. Note: it is observational, so the neighbor family is shown through an outsider's edit; worth a conversation.
Where This Film Lives
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