This is the small Balkan country after it was renamed North Macedonia. It entered the Oscar's vision for the second time after "Heavy Rain is Coming" and won two nominations for Best Documentary Feature Film and Best International Film. The year before last, there was also a documentary about Chinese high-definition designer Guo Pei's "Bright Yellow Forbidden Color", which represented New Zealand and declared the best foreign language film, but it was not nominated.
"Honeyland" records the quiet waiting of an old mother and daughter in the Balkan Valley. The mother was nearly blind and half-feeling, and every stretch was painful and laborious as if she was dying of her life; her daughter was over sixty years old and has not married so far, scraping natural honey from the woods all the year round in exchange for a meager source of life. Since World War II, Yugoslavia and Turkey have exchanged populations, and the mother and daughter are Turks who have never moved away, and even in the entire deserted village, there are only them and a few cats, the only ones with the outside world. The connection is that her daughter occasionally goes to the market in the capital Skopje to sell honey. A herdsman may be of Albanian ancestry rushing in noisily, the valley became hustle and bustle and happy, and there were conflicts between the means of production and the mode of production. The woman who always understands the rules of the hive better is destined to be the master here, and is destined to be bound forever by the valley. The herders left. In this corner forgotten by the world, there are still only two old women and a few cats, and the unchanging sound of the valley in the four seasons. This kind of life stream record with an ethnological background is also a common subject and scene of Chinese independent documentaries. Of course, the North Macedonian filmmakers are more refined, clear, and poetic. For college judges who are accustomed to watching Eurasian literary films or news documentaries, this type of record may give them a strange and fresh foreign land.
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