This "Honeyland", which swept all major award ceremonies in the film industry, was screened at the Guangzhou Documentary Film Festival last year, and it was a courtesy of the opening film. I went to see the premiere. After all, as an international film festival at my doorstep, it was a rare event. However, this work didn't win my favor at the time. After that, it was nominated for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, which is even more astounding! Recently, I watched this admirable film again, and still feel that it is still some distance away from the masterpiece.
I don't know exactly what this Sundance-style documentary is all about, because the film won the Sundance award last year and it became a buzzword. Since then, it has set off a storm of awards sweeping the film world. First of all, this film subverts my concept of documentary. Most of the desert scenes in the film are exactly the same as European art films. In addition, the film cancels the common voice-over commentary in documentaries and the interview with the protagonist. The camera is aimed at the beekeeper woman walking slowly in the mountains, following her in the difficult natural environment to find the traces of bees, the outdoor light and the shooting angle are extremely beautiful. These pictures of nature flowing with poetry are believed to be the focus of most film critics' generous words, and even made me forget that this is a documentary.
When the camera was aimed at the beekeeper and her elderly mother, I finally returned to what I had remembered as a documentary. However, when the uninvited neighbor's family appeared, the director’s carefully fabricated "plot" once again overturned my expectations for this documentary. This kind of "positioning" style documentary is not uncommon. The Italian director Gianfranco Rossi's "Roman Ring Road" and "Fireworks on the Sea" are the most typical examples. This "Honeyland" is said to have spent three years of filming materials collected by the director with the filming, and then through editing to construct those dramatic "plots". What the audience sees on the screen is a real event, which is undoubtedly true, but in my opinion, this is not the "experience" of the protagonist, but the "fact" consciously processed by the director, all dramas There is a reduction and obscuration of information between the plots. In other words, all the plots after the neighbor's appearance in the second half are edited according to the director's consciousness.
This creative method that breaks the line between documentary and fictional drama is highly manipulative. Although the material is obtained by waiting for the rabbit, it involves many moral controversies, such as shooting the neighbors going to the forest to steal honey. . In my opinion, the documentary produced by this creative method lacks sincerity and is full of speculation that is hard to conceal. Traditional documentaries have voice-over commentary and interviews. The director of this film first replaced the part of the explanation with a poetic scene of natural scenery, and then let the neighbor’s boy take the place of the interview role. He asked the beekeeper woman for answers through his mouth. This clever "hand" is also the reason why the film cannot please me.
Looking at it all the way, I kept speculating in my mind how much of the images and content we saw was real, and how much of it was deliberately edited out by the director. The answer is unknown. Nevertheless, this suspicious work of creative style can still capture the personality characteristics of the people living in this barren and barren land. In this remote area, there are still feudal ideas that favor sons and selfish aspects of human nature. The humanistic content seems to be an unexpected gain for the audience.
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